Son of Destruction Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Kit Reed

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  A Selection of Recent Titles by

  Kit Reed

  THINNER THAN THOU

  BRONZE

  THE BABY MERCHANT

  THE NIGHT CHILDREN

  ENCLAVE

  WHAT WOLVES KNOW

  SON OF DESTRUCTION

  Kit Reed

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain 2012 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9 –15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  First published in the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

  110 East 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2012 by Kit Reed.

  The right of Kit Reed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  Reed, Kit.

  Son of destruction.

  1. Journalists–California–Los Angeles–Fiction.

  2. Combustion, Spontaneous human–Fiction. 3. Florida–

  Fiction. 4. Suspense fiction.

  I. Title

  813.5'4-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-356-3 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8232-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-462-2 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Carl Brandt – the best of the best

  with love

  It won’t matter how hard he runs for the car, gulping air; he will always hear her. It won’t matter how fast he drives through the Florida night, how far he goes or how hard he tries, he can’t outrace the horror in the house behind him, the sudden flash of orange light that stained her bedroom window.

  He’ll spend the rest of his life running ahead of that night: police photos of the smoking remains, coals burned to glowing cinders in her belly.

  The guilt.

  It’s nothing I did. It’s nothing I did!

  Doubt overturns him.

  Then what was it?

  He doesn’t know. Nobody does.

  It’s all over the news by morning. Bulletins start coming in on his car radio before he hits the Interstate. Stopping for gas at dawn in Jacksonville, he sees footage on CNN and the fiery death is bannered on newsstands by the time he reaches Savannah. In the years since, he’s read magazines, books about her death and others like them – written by people compelled to explain the inexplicable because mysteries don’t die until somebody comes up with the answers.

  Does he only imagine that as he turned to leave, the air in the old woman’s bedroom changed – or that she did?

  He doesn’t know. Guilt sinks its teeth into him. Is it something I did?

  I can’t be that, he thinks, without knowing what that is, or why it is so urgent.

  I can’t do that.

  I won’t.

  He carries these things in his heart: a son that he’s never seen, and a secret that he doesn’t understand, but must keep at all costs. The responsibility is tremendous. Worry boils up in him. I can’t let him . . .

  Can’t let him – what? He doesn’t know. How do you help a son you’ve never met when you don’t know anything but that he’s yours, and you’re afraid for him?

  1

  Dan Carteret

  Burt was never his real dad. The truth is stamped in Dan’s face. He was built on a different template. By the time he was tall enough to look into a mirror, he knew. He grew up knowing, but when his mother finally let go of her secret she broke it gently, like bad news.

  Like, she thought he didn’t know?

  Even you could see it, going by at a dead run. With that bullet head and the used-car salesman’s smile, Burt Mixon is nothing like him. Where Dan is tall and easy with you, Burt is mean-spirited and short. He tried to be nice to Dan, but they didn’t like each other very much.

  He ran that house like boot camp: spit, polish, morning runs and excruciating clap pushups, the quintessential ex-Marine. The ex part rankled. Something went wrong on Parris Island back in the day, but that was before he married Lucy, and she’ll never tell. After he was separated from the service, Burt set himself up in New London, but he made a bad civilian. After a lifetime of pushing boots, training hick kids to shape up and snap to, he was moving used cars off the lot in a military town, and it rankled. Danny was his last recruit.

  ‘Did you do that?’ The sequence was pre-set. Burt used to stand over him, waiting for him to cry. When he was really little, it used to work. ‘Well, did you?’

  Whatever. That shrug. Dan is tougher now.

  ‘Goddammit, I’m trying to make a man out of you!’

  ‘I don’t care!’

  He shook off the beatings but not the guilty, conflicted look on his mother’s face. She loved him, probably too much, but Burt was her only husband, and in charge. ‘Don’t.’ He felt the edge of her hand between his shoulder blades – the gentle pressure that told him, It’s all right, love. I’m here. ‘He’s your father.’

  Burt was nothing to him.

  His mother only ever hit him once, on a strange, sad day before he was old enough to read, and it was so awful that they both cried. He found certain things in her jewel box before she swooped down on him and snatched everything away. Underneath all her beads and bracelets, he found a snapshot of five guys in a Jeep on some beach, laughing so hard that he thought they were laughing at him, and at the very bottom there was an envelope – was that his name? There w
as a newspaper inside. It was awful: pictures of somebody or some thing laid out in a ruined chair like a burnt-out log in a fireplace. One bedroom slipper with a foot in it, and a naked ankle bone, like it just broke off. Lucy ripped it away from him and smacked him hard. She disappeared it but he remembers. He still can’t make sense of the conflation: four laughing guys and the charred figure in the scorched chair.

  Kids like Dan, even kids who grow up happy, travel on the myth: these can’t be my real parents. I’m only stuck here until they come for me. It kept him going through the loneliness and hard times with Burt, and the snapshot fueled the myth. Until he comes for me.

  He was fifteen before she told him the truth.

  In fact, it wasn’t the main business of the meeting. It came out accidentally. Even though it was late afternoon in late winter in New London, she pulled him out on the back porch and shut the door, Lucy Mixon with her sweet face tight, setting her jaw in that brave little tough-mom way. She was all hung up on it: bent on telling him, not knowing how to say it.

  He wasn’t about to start. They stood there shivering.

  Finally she said in a tight voice, ‘Honey, you know we both love you very much but I have some kind of hard news.’

  He did not act surprised or upset when she explained that it wasn’t going to happen right away, but she and Burt were splitting up. It was over, she had to do it. When he didn’t respond she said, ‘You’re the only person I’ve told.’

  He looked past her, watching it get dark.

  ‘Danny? Dan?’

  She wanted him to react, she wanted him to say, ‘It’s OK,’ she wanted him to for God’s sake say something but he just stood there, waiting her out.

  After a long time she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  An icicle dropped.

  There was only the sound of her waiting.

  She said what mothers do in this situation, ‘Don’t worry, he’s not leaving you, OK? No matter what we do, he’s still your father.’

  It was so quiet that he could hear the ice cracking on the Thames.

  Lucy tried, ‘You don’t seem very upset.’

  Like he would feel bad that this abusive, sanctimonious jarhead bastard was being kicked out of their lives. He and Burt hated each other, even though they weren’t allowed to admit it.

  ‘Danny?’ Even in the dark, Lucy could see he was glad. ‘Dan?’

  ‘OK.’

  The hand she put on his arm was shaking. ‘I’m telling you first, so you won’t feel hurt. We both still love you.’

  He must have been one cold little bastard, standing there with his eyebrows clenched and his jaw carved in stone, nothing, not even an eyelid, twitching. Looking back, he feels bad about it. At the time he said, ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘We’ve been a family for so long. I just.’ She didn’t finish. After a while she said, ‘It’s over and I’m sorry, OK?’

  It was quiet for way too long. Oh God she was waiting for him to say something, what . . . appropriate.

  All these years later he’s sorry he couldn’t have been nicer with her. Softer. He should have hugged her and said he loved her and let her sob into the front of his fleece. He did what he could: he shrugged, signaling no problem, but she was too upset to read signals. ‘Dan?’

  Finally he said, ‘OK.’

  ‘I just don’t want you to be upset.’

  Oh Mom, don’t cry. ‘Why would I?’

  A light went on in the kitchen. Burt, looking for his dinner. For his wife, the assigned provider. ‘Lucy!’ He yelled loud enough for them to hear through sealed storm windows, ‘Where is everybody? What’s going on? Luce?’

  While Danny and his mother stood out there on the back porch with icicles dropping and everything in flux.

  She said, ‘We’ve been with him since before you were born, Danny. He’s just like your . . . well, he’s nothing like him, but . . .’

  ‘What?’

  She covered her mouth. ‘Oh honey, please don’t be upset.’

  He isn’t? He isn’t! Danny’s heart did a joyful flip. Oh God, I was right. ‘Why, Mom?’

  ‘You mean why am I telling you or why do I think you’re upset?’

  Her face went to pieces. Danny’s face stayed where it was.

  ‘He tried so hard, and I know he loves me.’ She was desperate to make him like the man she’d picked out to take care of them, she hoped for it even there, at the end of the arrangement. ‘I just don’t want you to miss him too much. Burt, I mean. When he goes.’

  ‘Like I would give a . . .’

  ‘Don’t, Danny. Don’t say flying fuck. Listen. I know you feel bad . . .’

  ‘I feel fine!’

  ‘But this might make you feel better. It. Uh. Oh Danny, I . . .’

  ‘Dan.’

  ‘Dan. Dan, it.’

  It was cold. Spit was freezing on his teeth but they had to stay out here on the rickety back porch until she finished. ‘It’s OK, Mom. You don’t have to tell me . . .’

  ‘Please, I’m trying to tell you something important.’

  He finished, ‘You just did.’

  But she didn’t hear. ‘I should have told you before.’

  She was a mess. God he hated Burt. ‘He’s going. We’re cool.’

  ‘That isn’t all.’

  ‘Mom?’ That little gulp of hesitation scared him. There was always the possibility that she was getting married again.

  Inside, pots crashed: Burt fending for himself. Never mind what had just passed between them, or that he understood long before she tried to tell him. Lucy needed to spell it out. She took the requisite deep breath: well. ‘About Burt.’ Sigh. ‘I didn’t want you to go on thinking he was your father.’

  An icicle dropped off the porch roof and knifed into the melting snow.

  ‘He was just a nice guy who came along at the right time.’

  Oh, is that all. Danny made her wait so she would understand what he was about to tell her. He dropped spaces between the words like bricks, to make sure she would remember. ‘Like you think I didn’t know?’

  ‘How?’

  Oh, Mom. Don’t look so betrayed. ‘How could I not?’ He made a smile for her, but it was too late, or too fake. ‘Mom, what’s the matter?’

  Water sheeted her eyes and hung, not spilling. It was a miracle of surface tension. Lucy was beaming, like, Thank God that’s over. This is how she surprised him: ‘I’m just so glad!’

  ‘Mom!’

  She rushed on. ‘I’m taking my name back. It’s Carteret.’

  He was trying to hang tough but as soon as she said it, the surface broke. I always knew.

  ‘If you want to, you can too.’

  Dan Carteret.

  ‘Yes!’ He covered his face fast, so Burt wouldn’t come running out to see what blazed out here in the dark just now, and shone so bright. He was that glad.

  One day my real father will come for me, he told himself. Prisoner of war, he thought, superhero, Marine deserter; the myth kept him going and it crystallized that night: it had to be one of the guys in that snapshot. Why else would she keep it for so long? It didn’t matter which one of the five it turned out to be, he was Not-Burt. Different. Unknown.

  ‘So you’re OK?’

  Gulp hard, man. Breathe. Exhale carefully, so you don’t spook her by shouting. ‘I’m good.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go back inside.’

  ‘Not yet.’ Dan put himself between Lucy and the door, trying to lead her where they had to go. ‘So. Carteret. That’s my father’s name?’

  ‘No. Now, move.’

  He swept her hand off the knob. ‘So. What’s Carteret. Something you made up?’

  ‘It’s my name, Dan, that I was born with. It’s who we are. Now, please. I’m getting cold.’

  ‘I said, not yet.’

  She tugged the door open in spite of him. ‘We’re never going to see him, you know.’

  He pushed it shut. ‘Why not, Mom? What is he, dead?’ r />
  ‘Danny, don’t.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ She scrubbed her hands down her face. ‘It doesn’t matter!’

  ‘In jail?’ They were having a little battle over the door.

  ‘No. If he was in jail we could . . . We can’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  Her face went through so many changes that it scared him. ‘We just can’t.’

  ‘Come on!’

  Picture of Lucy, thinking. It took her a minute to come up with, ‘There are people I have to protect.’

  ‘Like who? Him?’

  The look she gave him was uncompromising. Fierce. ‘Starting with you.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said bitterly. ‘So I don’t know who I am.’

  ‘You’re my son!’

  ‘I don’t know and you won’t tell me.’

  ‘You don’t have to be Dan Mixon any more, and that should be enough.’ Lucy’s hands were shaking. Her breath was shaking too. ‘Trust me, Danny, that’s all you need to know.’

  ‘Come on, Mom!’ Like a cop, he slammed the heel of his hand into his mother’s shoulder; they both heard the thud. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Who is he? Who is he really?’

  There was a pause during which he actually believed she was going to tell him. Her head came up, but her eyes were looking past him at something else. Then her voice lifted and floated clean away. ‘Just a boy I thought I loved.’

  Inside, a bowl broke on the kitchen tiles and Burt squawked. ‘Lucy!’ Had he guessed she was dumping him? Did he hear them out here on the porch? Dan didn’t think so. Burt didn’t care about Lucy, he was just pissed about the no dinner. ‘Lucy?’

  ‘What happened?’

  She put her fingers over Dan’s mouth, shushing him. Through the back window, they saw Burt slam the oven door and stalk out into the front room. She whispered, ‘Nothing. I can’t tell you.’

  God he was so angry. ‘That’s all? That’s all you’re going to say?’

  ‘That’s all you need to know.’ She turned, as if they were done.

  He pulled her back. ‘No it isn’t, Mom.’

  ‘OK,’ she said finally. ‘It was a boy from home.’

  ‘Where’s home?’