The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets)

by James, Harper

  ‘I knew it. I just knew it.’

  Hendricks spun away on his heel and kicked the sheet of ply nailed to the wall, muttering something inaudible under his breath. He turned abruptly and looked down at Evan.

  ‘Okay you interfering bastard, I’ll show you something. A lot more than you bargained for, that’s for sure. There’s just one thing though—it’ll be the last thing you ever see.’

  Chapter 41

  HE WALKED BACK TO the tunnel entrance, smiled his joyless smile at Evan.

  ‘Don’t you go anywhere, I’ll be back in a minute.’

  With that he disappeared back down the dark tunnel. The shotgun was still leaning against the wall but it might as well have been in the trunk of Evan’s car for all the good it did him. Even if he slid down onto his back and stretched out along the floor with his hands over his head he still wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near it with his feet. He couldn’t have held it and fired it with his hands cuffed together anyway; there would be more chance of shooting his own feet than hitting Hendricks.

  He didn’t have enough time to do anything anyway. Hendricks wasn’t away for more than a couple of minutes. He only went as far as the basement workshop to get some tools. In his left hand he had a crowbar, but it was the sledgehammer in his right hand that made Evan go rigid with fear, his muscles tensing and his bowels loosening, the back of his shirt drenched with sweat. He closed his eyes and prayed. He’d seen the movie Misery and winced along with everyone else when Annie Wilkes smashed Paul Sheldon’s ankles with a sledgehammer to stop him escaping.

  Hendricks saw his reaction and laughed. He lobbed the heavy sledgehammer into Evan’s lap. Evan managed to twist away and stop it landing on his balls.

  ‘You’ve seen that movie too, eh? Don’t worry, I’m not going to use it on you,’ Hendricks said. ‘I’ve got something much better lined up. You’ll wish I’d caved your head in with it before this is over.’

  He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, retrieved the sledgehammer from where it lay, still nestled between Evan’s legs. Then he walked over to the sheet of plywood against the wall that Evan had seen earlier and rested the sledgehammer against the wall. He jammed the crow bar under the edge of the plywood and levered it back and forth, prising it away from whatever it was nailed to. He worked his way methodically up and down one edge and then the other. Finally, he dropped the crow bar pulled the ply away from the wall altogether with his hands. Behind it there was a bricked-up doorframe. He tapped the brickwork with the wooden handle of the sledgehammer, a hollow sound echoing around the room.

  Evan was filled with a feeling of impending dread as Hendricks stepped back and squared up to the wall in front of him. Then he swung the hammer into the middle of the brickwork. It flexed but nothing broke loose. He took another swing with the same result. He leaned the sledgehammer against the wall.

  ‘I must have done a better job than I thought,’ he said, turning back to Evan. He slapped his forehead. ‘I’ve got a much better idea.’ He took the key to the handcuffs out of his pocket and walked over to Evan.

  ‘Roll over onto your belly.’

  Evan rolled over and lay with his arms outstretched above his head and around the pole. Hendricks put his foot between Evan’s shoulder blades and leaned down and grabbed hold of one of his arms and unlocked the handcuff. He dropped the key onto the floor. Then he stepped back quickly, picked up the shotgun and pointed it at Evan.

  ‘You can do it. Take off the other handcuff first. And don’t try anything stupid either.’

  Evan unlocked the other cuff and slowly stood up. He couldn’t put his full weight on his ankle.

  ‘I can’t put any weight on this leg. How do you expect me to do it?’

  ‘I can even them up if you think that’ll help.’

  Evan hobbled over and picked up the sledgehammer. Even if he could walk properly he wouldn’t be able to get across the room before Hendricks blew him into little pieces. He steadied himself as best he could and started on the wall. His ankle screamed every time his weight shifted onto it, but it didn’t take long before the first brick punched through.

  A draft of warm, dry air escaped through the hole as the brick dropped into the room beyond. After that the rest of the brickwork gave way easily and soon the top half of the doorway was clear. He could easily have climbed through. A constant flow of warm air blew across his face, almost as if he was looking into another tunnel.

  ‘That’s enough for now,’ Hendricks said. ‘I don’t want too much work to do when I have to brick that up again.’ He sniggered. ‘Drop the sledgehammer and take a look inside.’

  Evan dropped the sledgehammer but he didn’t look inside. He was overwhelmed by a dreadful foreboding at what might be in the cavity. Instead he turned to face Hendricks.

  ‘It’s too dark. I can’t see anything.’

  Hendricks picked up the flashlight that Evan had dropped. He rolled it across the floor towards him. Evan looked down at it like it was a stick of dynamite.

  ‘Pick it up,’ Hendricks said, the irritation in his voice growing, ‘and take a look.’

  ‘No.’

  If Hendricks was going to kill him anyway, it didn’t matter if he did what he said or not.

  But Hendricks was fast, incredibly fast. He took a couple of swift paces across the room and kicked Evan’s good leg out from under him. Evan landed on his butt with a thump, a cloud of dry dust and dirt settling around him. Hendricks reversed the shotgun in his hands and clubbed him viciously on the side of the head with the butt, knocking him sideways into a dazed jumble of pain on the floor.

  Hendricks put the shotgun down, bent over and twisted Evan’s right arm hard up behind his back. He grabbed Evan’s collar, straightened up and hauled him onto his feet.

  ‘Time to meet your new roommates,’ he said, spinning the pair of them around so that Evan faced the gaping black hole.

  Evan tried to struggle but he couldn’t focus properly. With a broken ankle and his arm up behind his back, he didn’t have a chance.

  Hendricks jerked Evan’s arm upwards savagely, pushing his head and upper body through the hole, bending him double over the edge until his feet were barely on the ground. Evan thrashed from side to side but it was no use, it only made the screaming pressure on his shoulder worse.

  In one fluid movement Hendricks released his grip on Evan’s arm, dropped onto one knee and clamped his arms around his lower legs. He stood up sharply, tipping him all the way through the opening. Evan tumbled down a short flight of steps on the other side, landed in a heap at the bottom, the pile of broken bricks underneath him. Hendricks picked up the flashlight, leaned into the opening and bounced it off Evan’s head.

  ‘It would have been much easier if you’d picked it up when I told you.’

  Evan lay still with his eyes closed for a minute to catch his breath. His chest was heaving from struggling against Hendricks. Every part of his body ached. His head was still spinning. He heard Hendricks moving around on the other side of the wall. Then he heard a sound that made his stomach turn to ice.

  Hendricks grunted as he picked up the big sheet of plywood and shuffled towards the hole with it, slid it sideways along the floor and over the doorway. The wedge of light slowly shrank as he pushed until it disappeared altogether and the room was plunged into impenetrable darkness. There was a moment’s silence as he caught his breath, then hammered the nails back into the wooden frame, the banging impossibly loud in Evan’s makeshift dungeon, reverberating around inside his head.

  Chapter 42

  HE PUSHED HIMSELF INTO a sitting position and felt around on the floor until he found the flashlight. He took a deep breath and switched it on, made a slow, hesitant sweep. He was in a small room not more than eight feet square. The walls and the ceiling were crudely lined with rough timber and the floor was dry and dusty. In the top right-hand corner an ancient air vent fluttered, a steady flow of warm, dry air coming from it. There were no lights.


  The beam of light settled, as if drawn by some malevolent unseen force beyond Evan’s control, on the leg of a metal single bed along the back wall, the only piece of furniture in the room. He snapped off the flashlight and embraced the comforting darkness. He didn’t want to look at what was on the bed. He didn’t need to, he knew what it was. It didn’t mean he had to look at it. He leaned his head against the wall behind him and tried to calm down. It was impossible. He would never be calm again, not here, not in this room where panic surged relentlessly inside him, fighting to own him. He bent at the waist, pushed his thumbs hard into his throbbing, swollen ankle. The hot sudden pain made him gasp. He dug in deeper, gouging with his fingernails, squeezing out every last ounce of catharsis until he couldn’t bear it any longer. Then he switched the flashlight back on and shone the beam onto the grotesque tableau laid before him on the bed.

  The mummified corpse of Robbie Clayton—who else could it be?—sat upright on the bed leaning against the wall. His skin was a mottled brown color, leathery and split in places where it stretched tightly across his cheekbones and chin. His nose was shrivelled, his lips shrunken over yellowing teeth. The eye sockets were empty and gazed silently at the small figure that lay across his lap. His son. Daniel Clayton. Evan choked, swallowed a ragged lump as big as his fist made of broken glass, his eyelids hot and stinging.

  The mummification of Daniel’s smaller body was more advanced, the dried tissues of his body powdery and starting to disintegrate, parts of his skeleton now visible. There was no smell, the drying process long since complete.

  They hadn’t been merely imprisoned, they had been immured. Robbie had starved to death. His son had not. Evan blinked rapidly, rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. From the obscene angle of the child’s head it was obvious his small neck had been broken. Mercifully broken by the despairing hands of a grief-stricken father. Broken with love to save him from the horrors of a slow, lingering death.

  He switched off the flashlight. It made no difference. How could it? The horrific scene would be burned into his memory forever. How could it possibly be dismissed by the simple flick of a switch? He was thankful that forever for him was unlikely to last very long.

  He sat contemplating his future, or, to be more precise, lack of one. He was sure Hendricks planned to leave him here to die just like the others. He couldn’t let him go now. The easiest thing was to simply lock all the doors and come back in a couple of months or years and brick up the hole again. For all he knew he might have already done just that. He’d conveniently left the key in the ignition to his car. Hendricks could dump it somewhere at his leisure. He would join the ranks of all the other missing persons, if anyone even noticed he wasn’t there anymore. Just like Robbie Clayton before him, he had found Daniel Clayton and paid the ultimate price for his perseverance.

  The thought of what had happened to Robbie compared to the vile rumors that had been spread around town about him made Evan despair. If he could only have escaped he could set all that straight as well as giving Linda Clayton the closure that had eluded her all these years.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the crowbar being jammed between the ply and the doorframe. Had Hendricks come back already with bricks and mortar to seal him permanently into his tomb? A brief glimmer of hope crossed his mind—perhaps Guillory had suspected that he would return and had come back herself? But if that was the case, surely she’d have called out.

  No, it could only be Hendricks. And this would be his one and only chance to escape. He had scant seconds to prepare himself before the makeshift door was pulled away. The unholy screeching of the nails echoed round the room, setting his teeth on edge like fingernails raked down a chalkboard, as, one by one, they were prised from the wooden frame.

  The floor around him was littered with broken bricks. He swept the beam of the flashlight across them, saw two broken bricks still joined together with mortar, their edges sharp and jagged. He picked them up, hefted them in his hand. Together they must have weighed a good ten pounds. Heavy enough to make a decent weapon that was for sure.

  Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he pushed himself up onto his feet. There was nowhere to hide but that didn’t mean he’d make it easy for Hendricks. He stood off to the side of the steps and flattened his back against the wall, his head level with the bottom edge of the hole. If Hendricks wanted to shoot him he’d have to poke the shotgun in which would give him a chance. Not much of a chance, but better than nothing. Grasping the rudimentary weapon in his hand he waited.

  The plywood sheet had been worked away from the frame a few inches. A faint light spilled in from the basement room behind it—more than enough for him to see the gut-wrenching scene on the bed just a few feet away. He closed his eyes, concentrated on what was going on outside.

  With a final protesting screech the board was pulled away completely and light flooded in.

  ‘You still in there?’ Hendricks called. ‘I thought you might like some company. And just so you know, if I see anything appear in that hole, I’ll shoot it.’

  Was he completely insane?

  Had he come back again just to shoot the breeze with him, before sealing him in again? Had he come back to gloat? He had to distract him somehow.

  ‘Introduced yourself to your roommates yet?’ Hendricks said and snickered. ‘Although I don’t think they’re very talkative.’

  The snicker was replaced by a full-bodied laugh. More than anything he’d ever known, Evan wanted to smash the bricks in his hand into Hendricks’ face to stop that obscene noise.

  ‘You’re a monster. A sick monster.’

  Hendricks stopped laughing, pulled himself together.

  ‘You won’t believe me, but it wasn’t me, it was Adamson.’

  He sounded like a pathetic child in the playground.

  ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you? It’s always someone else’s fault with people like you. The way I hear it, it’s the story of your life.’

  ‘See, I said you wouldn’t believe me, but I’m telling the truth. Doesn’t matter what I say now, you’re never going to repeat it to anyone.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing him again soon.’

  The words rode out of his mouth on the back of a sick snigger.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Why do you care now? It won’t do you any good.’

  ‘Call it a last request.’

  Hendricks gave the request some consideration.

  ‘Okay. Just don’t think you’re going to get a last meal as well. I’m afraid the room service isn’t great where you’re staying. Ask the other guests.’

  He laughed again at his own sick humor.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was trying to get my life straight. I’d had some bad breaks and I wanted a new start.’

  If it hadn’t been so sickening, Evan would have been amused to hear him describe his stay in prison for statutory rape as a bad break.

  ‘I’d done some time in prison—’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. It got overturned anyway.’ His candor obviously had its limits. ‘When I got out I came back here and tried to make a new life.’

  ‘You changed your name.’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?’

  ‘I heard Adamson call you Jason.’

  Hendricks seemed satisfied. Evan could almost feel him relax again on the other side of the wall. It was so bizarre talking to him like this, sitting not six feet from his victims as if they were just two people having a normal conversation.

  ‘Stupid bastard,’ he hissed.

  Evan assumed he meant Adamson, not himself.

  ‘He’s the cause of all this shit. He ruined everything.’

  Evan inched sideways to try to see where Hendricks was but the angle was all wrong. He inched back again and waited for him to continue.

  ‘I came back, got a nice easy job as the school
bus driver and everything was going just fine. I had a new identity, regular money and this nice house to live in.’

  ‘And you dug yourself a nice secret chamber—’

  ‘That wasn’t me. It was already here.’

  Evan was fully aware he was getting a carefully edited version of events. The gospel according to Carl Hendricks.

  ‘And then something happened to spoil your perfect world?’

  ‘You got that right. Jack Adamson happened.’

  There was real, heartfelt venom in his tone. Evan heard a thud that sounded like Hendricks kicking something solid on the floor. Then it struck him. Hendricks had either killed or knocked out Adamson and dragged him back to the basement room. That’s what he meant when he said he thought Evan might like some company. He was going to dump him in the room with Evan before sealing it up for good.

  ‘He just turned up one day. He’d got out of prison a few days before and he had nowhere to go. Been sleeping rough.’

  ‘I’m having trouble seeing you as the Good Samaritan.’

  ‘I owed him.’

  ‘It must have been a hell of a debt. What did he do, save you from all the other cons when you were inside?’

  Hendricks didn’t say anything and Evan knew he was right. It was time to push him harder, try to provoke a careless reaction.

  ‘It makes me wonder what you were in for if you needed protecting from the other prisoners. It’s not like you’re so pretty they were after a piece of your ass.’

  ‘You can wonder what the hell you like.’ He sniggered again. ‘You’re going to have plenty of time for thinking.’

  The mix of sick humor and gloating smugness made Evan’s gut clench, an overwhelming urge to smash the bricks he was holding right into his grinning face, turn it into a mass of blood and broken teeth, consuming him.

  ‘I think it’s because you were in for interfering with little kids.’

  ‘You shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for good.’

  ‘Was it little boys? I think it probably was. You seem the sort to me. You can’t handle women, can you, not grown ones anyway. Can’t you get it up, Jason?’