Caine's Law Read Online Free Page A

got a funny look on his face, like he was worried and scared and mad all at the same time. “You can’t be here—you
can’t
be here …”
    “But I am.”
    “You’re supposed to be dead.”
    “So I hear.”
    Dad’s hand on my shoulder clutched tight so suddenly that it shocked me right out of sobbing, then faster than I’d ever seen a man move, Dad was on his feet and had dragged me behind him to put himself between me and the old guy.
    “What do you want here?” Dad growled in his
tell me before I pound you to paste
voice, and he was a
lot
bigger than the old guy and he was younger than the old guy and stronger than a person ought to be and had those hands like bricks, and the old guy didn’t look scared at all. Just kind of sad, again.
    “What if …” he said slowly. “What if you could take back the worst thing you ever did?”
    “What?”
    “Would you? If you could unring a bell, just one time. Would you?”
    Dad kind of leaned toward him and bent his knees a little. “Stay away from me. Stay away from my family.” I could hear the clench in his jaw. “If I ever see you again—”
    He didn’t say
I’ll kill you
, but he didn’t have to.
    “I wasn’t exactly expecting to bump into you two today,” the old guy said. “It won’t happen again.”
    He leaned around Dad’s shoulder and met my eyes. “Remember what I said. And always kiss your mother good-bye, kid. Don’t forget. Always.”
    “What you
said
?” Dad’s voice went all thick, like he was getting mad so fast it was choking him. “You … were
talking
? With my son?”
    His hands went for the front of the old guy’s tunic and I knew what was coming next: Dad would lift him up and shake him, hard, and if that wasn’t enough, he’d hold on to the tunic with one hand while he used the other to beat the old guy bloody, because that was what happened when Dad got angry enough to put his hands on somebody. Except this time.
    Before Dad could grab the guy’s tunic, the old guy said, “Don’t.”
    And Dad didn’t.
    The old guy looked about as harmless as an old guy can look without being actually broke-down, but there must have been some magic in that one quiet word because it stopped Dad cold—
real
cold, frozen, hands in front, close enough to grab or hit or whatever. But he didn’t.
    “Duncan. Pull your shit together,” the old guy said. “You’ve got problems more serious than me.”
    When I think about that moment …
    Dad and the Social Police. Dad and the Studio. Dad and the Board of Governors. Dad and the Leisurefolk and Investors who rule the Earth, and the Businessmen and Administrators who run it. Dad and Mom. Dad and me.
    Dad.
    Because now, all these years later, I understand what I saw that day.
    In the book Kris Hansen wrote about me, he had Tan’elKoth tell the Board of Governors how to beat me.
We must teach him to think of himself as a defeated man
.
    My father had been more than defeated. He’d been crushed. He had poked his head up out of the grass, and the boot of human civilization had stomped him flat.
    Slowly.
    And through it all, his degenerative neurological disorder had been inexorably transforming him into exactly the kind of man he had given his life to fight: stupid, erratic, and violent. And he
knew
it.
    He never even got to forget.
    All those years … every time he looked at me, he remembered every time he had hurt me. He remembered choking me. Remembered hitting me with his hands, or other things. Books. Chairs. Frying pans. Once, memorably, a pipe wrench.
    Sometimes he had blackouts. Not many.
    I’m pretty sure he remembered beating Mom to death.
    We never talked about her. Never. But you could see it in his eyes. The memory would hit and his eyes would go empty. Wet marbles. Nothing there at all. Not sadness. Not even regret. He’d lose the thread of whatever we were talking about, and he’d be just gone. Gone like he used to be after one of his rages. Not like he’d go dead.