The Man He Never Was Read online

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to—”

  “It was a rhetorical question.” Sloane jabbed a finger at Toren. “You’re worming your way back into her heart just like you did so many times before you disappeared. And like so many times before, you’re going to let her down and break her heart once again.”

  “No, this time—”

  “This time it’s different? Really? How is it different than the other times you promised not to lose your temper?”

  “Wait a second.” Toren frowned. “You said you were okay with this, with me having a chance with the kids. Did I miss something?”

  Sloane sighed heavily and rubbed her forehead. “No. It’s just . . . This is a lot . . . and fast.” She turned and looked at the furniture. “Who are those for?” He could tell by the look in her eyes she knew they were for Callie.

  “I’m trying, Sloane.”

  “I don’t want her getting hurt again. You have no idea—”

  “I know. I won’t.”

  She turned to go. “You did a wonderful job. Good-bye, Toren.”

  After they left he went into the family room—empty except for a sofa, a small coffee table, and a TV—and celebrated his time with Callie, but it couldn’t erase the pain he’d seen on Sloane’s face. Toren tried to lose himself in a show, but his mind kept spinning between images of Sloane and Colton and Callie and Eden and Quinn and Letto.

  His cell rang. No caller ID.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, pal, didja have a good talk with your new friend Eden the other day? Looked like you did. She’s cute.” Laughter. “You gonna give up on Sloane and go for her instead?”

  “Let’s get together and talk about it.”

  Letto’s laughter was high pitched. “No, no, I don’t think so. I might make you mad enough to awaken the sleeping giant inside, and we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?”

  “I’m going to find you and—”

  “And do what, ol’ pal?” That laughter again. “Kill me? Nah, that won’t work. Take me down to the police and tell them a buddy from high school who is six inches shorter and seventy pounds lighter is threatening you? Told you he was going to keep a promise? That won’t work either. Don’t be an idiot, Toren.”

  “Let’s get together.”

  “Let me lay it out for you, Toro. As long as you don’t go crazy and stir things up, I’ll stay away from you. But you start mucking around in stuff that’s dead and gone and buried, and I’ll have to come out and play. With you. With Sloane. With your kids. Got it?”

  Toren blinked. “Are you talking about me finding out where I was for eight months and what was done to me?”

  “I shouldn’t have called you an idiot. See how smart you are?”

  Toren’s heart hammered. “What do you know about that?”

  “Nothing, really. Nothing important.”

  “Are you part of it?”

  Silence.

  “What do you know!”

  The line went dead. Toren set down his cell and wiped his damp palms on his legs. Letto knew something. What? How much? And why, after all these years, would the psychopath suddenly decide it was time to even the score?

  He groaned. Nice. He’d just hit the trifecta. Trying to win Sloane back. Trying to figure out what had happened to him. And now, trying to deal with a man who was probably truly insane.

  CHAPTER 15

  That’s the bizarre thing, the reason I know I’ve truly changed,” Toren told Quinn the next morning at the gym. “I’m ticked off, but I’m not out of control. I’m actually quite calm. I’m simply going to track the guy down, grab him around the neck if needed, and give him an extremely detailed description of what I’m going to do to him if he gets anywhere near my family.”

  Quinn added another forty-five-pound plate to each side of the barbell and slid onto the bench.

  “That’s good.” He lifted the bar off the rack and started his reps. “Maybe you really have crushed your temper. You’re turning into the Hulk, or getting control of the Hulk, or figuring out how to keep Bruce Banner in charge, you know?”

  “What?” Toren staggered back as if he’d been shot.

  “Hey, you spotting me here, brother?” Quinn grunted out another rep. “Gonna need you for the last three, and I’m almost there.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Toren moved back to the bar, his head in a daze. “I’m here.”

  Toren helped Quinn gut through his final three reps, but the moment the bar lodged back into place on the rack, he tilted his head back and clutched for the shard of memory that had cut into his mind the second Quinn had mentioned the Hulk. A memory from his time away.

  Quinn sat up, a puzzled look on his face as he peered at Toren. “You okay, man?”

  “What do you mean, getting control?”

  “In the Avengers movie, you know. The first one with Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo . . . You saw it, right?”

  “Yeah . . . but what about the control part?”

  “At the end of the first movie, Dr. Banner gets control of the Hulk’s rage. So he can use him to tear up the Chitauri at the end.”

  “Tell me about the Hulk, Q.”

  “You’re getting a memory.”

  “Yeah, for a second I did, but now it’s gone. Help me get it back.” Toren sat next to Quinn on the bench, his heart hammering harder than it had at any point during the workout. “Tell me everything you know.”

  Quinn flexed his arms and waggled his fists on either side of his stomach. “Hulk smash puny human!”

  “I’m serious, Q.”

  “I know, just had to set the stage.”

  “Stage set.”

  “The Incredible Hulk is a brilliant interpretation of two classics of nineteenth-century literature.”

  “What?” Toren said. “You’re saying the Hulk came from classic novels?”

  “Yeah.” Quinn smiled. “You don’t know where the story came from?”

  “That’s why I’m asking, Professor. Not everyone is a geek like you.”

  “Stan Lee says the Hulk is a combo of Frankenstein’s monster plus Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You know, the monster within all of us. In the Hulk, the monster is the alter ego of Dr. Bruce Banner. And he escapes the doctor.”

  Toren’s gut twisted. More shards of memory stabbed at him, but they faded even more quickly than they appeared.

  “I think the story resonated with people because, if we’re willing to admit it, we all have a monster inside us, and we’re fighting to stop it from taking over our lives. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a potion caused the transformation. With the Hulk, it’s gamma radiation from a bomb plus stress that causes the change. And when the Hulk is ticked off, wow, look out. Serious anger issues. Just like most humans walking around this planet.”

  Something snapped in Toren’s mind, something like a piece of wood being broken off a door panel, allowing him to peek into a room long boarded up.

  Toren put his eye up to the door in his mind and peered into the room. Short bursts of light illuminated memories for too short a time to figure out what they were. But Toren refused to let go. Inside his mind he grabbed the doorknob and tried to turn it, but it was as fixed as rusted iron. He had to get in, and he willed the flashes of light to last longer, but they refused. As he continued to peer through the opening, Quinn’s monologue seemed muted. Toren yanked himself away from the images and spun toward Quinn.

  “What else, Quinn? Tell me more.”

  “I am. You just interrupted.”

  “Where did the story came from? How did Stan Lee develop the idea for the comic book?”

  “You mean the Jekyll and Hyde thing.”

  “Yes. In detail. Please.”

  Quinn frowned . . . apparently seeing something in Toren’s face that bothered him. Little doubt it was his desperate yanking on the door inside his mind.

  “In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein creates a grotesque creature during a science experiment. But
he’s not the monster most people think of when we think of the movies. In the novel the monster has times of self-reflection. He ponders why he was given his horrible fate. Wonders why he was created and then hated and hunted down and tortured by society.

  “That theme is in the early Hulk issues big-time. He doesn’t even understand who he is—back then the Hulk’s IQ didn’t make it past sixty—and all he wants to do is be a hermit, run off, and find peace. But he can’t control himself when he gets mad, so he ends up giving in to his rage and destroying a lot of things.

  “That contrast led Stan Lee to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Essentially it’s a novella that explores the idea of a split personality. Or in terms psychiatrists would use, dissociative identity disorder, meaning more than one personality exists within the same body.”

  Toren shook his head. “I thought it was just about a monster that was incredibly strong. Had no clue about Jekyll and Hyde.”

  “But do you see now why the story of Jekyll and Hyde is so relevant to the Hulk?”

  “Pretend I don’t,” Toren said.

  “Because in Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson portrays one distinctly good personality and one distinctly evil personality. Henry Jekyll ends up in an all-out war with his dark half, Edward Hyde. Jekyll says that he and every other man and woman is ‘not truly one, but truly two,’ and he sees the human soul as the ultimate battleground of our lives—one part of us an angel, the other a demon, both struggling for mastery and destruction of the other.”

  The door inside Toren’s mind burst open, and the flashes of light began lasting longer and coming faster. A man holding a book. A white T-shirt one day, then a black T-shirt the next. Every other day. Black. White. Black. White. Others around Toren. A memory of the air being dry. Dark wood on the walls. Floor-to-ceiling windows framing red rocks outside.

  More images flooded his mind: of exercises for body and mind, of memorized disciplines and texts, of deprivation and resolve. Then, without a shred of warning, the door slammed shut, the light went dark, and the spray of memories was cut off as if a great fire hose had been stomped on by a foot the size of the Hulk’s.

  Toren fought to hold on to the memories that had swirled in his mind moments earlier, but they melted away amid a voice growing steadily louder somewhere above him.

  “Hey, Toren, my man, you okay? You okay?”

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and opened his eyes to find himself slumped on the gym’s floor mats, Quinn kneeling beside him, deep concern reflected in his eyes.

  “Yeah.” Toren shook his head as if to rid himself of the frustration of being so close to answers and seeing them slip away like water sinking into sand. “I’m good.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yeah, I am. They’re starting to come back. Memories. I think I was someplace down in the Southwest.”

  “That’s good, man. That’s really good.” Quinn motioned to the barbell. “We done?”

  “No, let’s finish. I’m fired up.” He nodded at Quinn. “Answers are coming, and I’m not going to give up till I get ’em all.”

  As Toren walked to his car an hour later, his cell phone vibrated. A text from Eden:

  I’ve returned. Can you meet tomorrow? 10am at the Starbucks just off main?

  Toren texted back:

  Thought you didn’t like coffee shops.

  Yes or no, Toren?

  Yes, I’ll see you in the morning. I’ve had a breakthrough.

  CHAPTER 16

  Toren stepped through the doors of Starbucks the next morning at nine thirty, needing to get out of his house, which was too quiet, too empty. He’d called Sloane a few times, but she hadn’t called back. She only texted, and her responses were as short as possible. She’d left minutes before he’d arrived to move Callie’s furniture in—no surprise—and he racked his brain thinking of how he could get to her heart. Plus, there was Colton, who wasn’t hostile toward Toren but wasn’t exactly warm either. He had to give it time.

  He cleaned out his e-mail—there wasn’t much these days—and had almost finished pulling up the research he wanted to show Eden when the same feeling of being watched that he’d had at the park grabbed him around the throat and clamped down tight. Maybe it was his imagination working overtime, but the sense was palpable. Whoever it was felt close. Letto?

  The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention like little soldiers. Someone stalking him in a coffee shop? Why? There were no reasons. Not true. There were two hundred and forty-two days of them, the lost days when he could have done things, said things, that didn’t please any number of people. The days when he could have made friends or enemies.

  The place was crowded. If someone was watching him, they would see him turn and avert their eyes too fast for him to be sure of which gaze had been locked onto the back of his head. A second later a possibility struck him. If he had a mirror, he could look behind him without turning around. But how? If he asked one of the female customers for a makeup mirror, he stood a good chance of scaring the watcher off—not to mention the strange looks he’d get from the woman.

  Toren glanced at his laptop screen. Bingo. He had a fifteen-inch mirror right in front of him. Easy to make it work. Create a black background that filled his screen and it would act like a mirror. He pulled up his graphics editor, then tilted his screen down so the person behind him would have to be on their knees to see what he was working on. Then he created a new file, made a box that filled the borders of the program, and colored it black. In less than ten seconds it was done. He turned down the brightness on his screen to its lowest setting and studied his reflection. Excellent. It offered a clear mirror of his shirt and the table.

  Toren tilted his screen slightly and five people came into the reflection. Two elderly gentlemen sat at a table close behind and to his left. To his right, three women were gathered, the one in the center noticeably tall. Farther back, a woman sat by herself. Next to her, another woman alone was staring at her cell phone, and a man nearby held a newspaper. None of them looked his direction. He stayed focused on his screen.

  Over the next three or four minutes, two of the women from the group of three looked up, as did one of the men to the left. Then one by one the rest of them did, except for one of the women sitting by herself. It was impossible to tell if they were looking at him or simply glancing around the shop. He needed a way to zero in on the one who was watching him in their peripheral vision as well.

  Toren reached for his cup of coffee, and as he did, he nudged a stack of three napkins off the table. They fluttered to the tile floor. Perfect. In a few seconds he would make the cup take a similar leap to land right on top of the napkins.

  If his aim were true, the sound of the cup hitting the floor would be muffled by the napkins. No one would notice unless they were focused on him. And if they were, it would be tough for them not to be distracted by the cup falling off the table and at least glance down at the floor. The slightest movement of their head—when the rest of those behind him didn’t move—was all he needed to see. The problem was, he didn’t have much hope this little experiment of his would help. If it didn’t reveal anything, he’d still believe someone was following him. Didn’t matter. He had to try something.

  Toren adjusted the screen again and stared into his makeshift mirror.

  He slid his drink to the edge of the table, then leaned back. Was the feeling of being watched still there? Yes, as intense as ever. No reason to wait any longer. Toren counted down from three . . . two . . . one, then pushed his cup over. The instant it hit the napkins, he stared at the reflection of the shop behind him.

  Yes! His heart rate spiked. The tall woman who was part of the trio glanced for an instant at the cup, then jerked her gaze back up. Her eyes were riveted on the back of his head. An instant later they caught sight of the computer screen and went wide—she had to have realized what he’d done.

  Toren twisted in his seat, but not quickly enough. The woman was gone. He leaped
to his feet and scanned both directions. There! He spotted the back of her head disappearing through a door at the back of the coffee shop. Toren sprinted toward it. He reached the door, yanked down on the handle, and growled. No! She’d locked it. He slammed his shoulder into the door. It shuddered, but the lock refused to give way, even with his full 235 pounds behind it.

  One of the baristas looked his direction and frowned. Toren held up his hands and grinned. “Sorry! It’s all good.”

  The employee glared as his gaze raked Toren up and down. Then he motioned with his head to get away from the door. Toren complied by shuffling away, but the instant the barista turned back to serving up coffee, he sprinted for the front door.

  Had to find her. In less than ten seconds he was around the back of the building whipping his gaze back and forth in all directions. How had she slipped away so fast? Easy. Any of the doors across the alley could have been her corridor of escape. Or she could have backtracked and still be inside the shop. If he went in asking to search their back rooms, he doubted they’d comply.

  Toren pounded his fist into his palm. A flash of emotion tried to surface. The rage he knew so well was about to erupt. No. Had known. He did not know that rage anymore. That was not him any longer. The old man was dead. Toren shifted his focus to trying to wrap his brain around the reality of what had just happened.

  A shudder went through him, and he felt cold even though the morning was rapidly warming. Until now he’d thought Letto was working alone. Unsettling.

  As he staggered back inside, he was accompanied by curious glances from four or five customers. Apparently they’d never seen a lunatic jump up and race out of a coffee shop like their hair was on fire. He offered a sheepish grin, which they didn’t seem to accept.

  Toren eased over to the two women still at the table. He guessed they were in their midtwenties, one blonde, one red-haired.

  “Excuse me.”

  They looked up, guilt splashed on both their faces.