“I thought I told you to keep her doped up on that stuff I gave you.”
“I did. But see, the bottle got left open somehow and it got knocked over in the sink. I give the kid a good dose of nighttime cold-and-fever medicine. It keeps him out for a few hours at a time. I could give her some, or I got some bourbon, I think.”
“You ain’t drinking on this job, are you?”
“You know I wouldn’t do that,” Dixie said defensively. “Just a bracer for my nerves.”
Peanut reached in his pocket and took out the pills he had for his back. “Mix up these in a shot of that cough medicine. Dose her good with that and I’ll run back up to the drugstore and get some more of the good stuff. She needs to be comatose. But for Christ’s sakes, put some clothes on her.”
“Like what?”
“Like a old T-shirt or something. She ain’t a wild damn animal. And if Buck comes back through that door, you kill the son of a bitch, and that’s my order. He wants the gal bad enough to defy me and he can just spend eternity with her taking a dirt nap. He sure as hell won’t ever do us any good if he don’t learn to control his urges.”
“He’s out of control sometimes, Daddy.”
“Look, Dixie, all you got to do is keep her and the kid out for a few hours. We’ll go on and get rid of them before sunrise. It’s too dangerous keeping them alive. But I was serious about Buck. We’re just gone overdose them with the good stuff. No sense in torturing the poor things without a reason.”
“It wouldn’t be Christian,” Dixie said. “Abusing them more than we have to.”
“Right.” Peanut kissed Dixie on the forehead. “I’m trusting you to do this right, girl. Just lay off the liquor till afterwards.”
Peanut went out into the warehouse, and as he passed the door to the storage room, he pounded on it, making a hollow drum sound, and he heard the dogs scurrying around, afraid—knowing it was him. They had been conditioned so that anybody, aside from the family, was food for them. They stayed in a steel room, ate out of ripped-open bags of dog food, lived in their own filth until one of the kids hosed it down. A vet had taken out their vocal cords when they were puppies. Peanut didn’t want his dogs to bark at intruders; he wanted them silent so if somebody broke into the warehouse looking to steal from the Smoots, they wouldn’t realize they were screwed until they were on the ground being torn limb from limb. Sure as dead’s cold, his dogs would do it right. Wasn’t like he hadn’t tested them before. He had been thinking that he might just try them out on Sarnov when he got a chance.
He wasn’t worried about the Dockery woman escaping, because between the dogs and the locked door, she couldn’t any more get out of here than she could turn herself into a cat. But if the dogs got her, there’d likely be blood evidence left in the dirt. He watched enough forensic TV shows to know what the cops could do with just a tiny amount of blood. Since this involved a federal judge, they’d use the FBI technicians to sift each dirt crumb for blood, he was sure of it.
Peanut went out the door, padlocking it behind him. He went directly to the shed and stood beside Buck, still lashed to the post. Peanut took out his knife, snapped it open, and showed Buck the blade so it reflected the light from the shed’s bare bulbs.
“I’m going to say this one time, son. If you never listened to me before, you better do it now.”
“Damn it, Daddy, I already told you—”
“Shut up and listen!” Peanut growled, putting the blade against his son’s throat. “By God, if you so much as go into that barn, and I mean step through that damned door right over there for any reason, I will kill you. You will stay right out here in this shed. You got that?”
Buck nodded his head, eyes downcast.
“It was her—”
“I don’t care if she sticks a tittie up to that padlock hole over there, you just look at it from way over here.”
The twins giggled.
Peanut cut the ropes, waited for Buck to pull up his pants, then handed him a twelve-gauge shotgun that was leaned against a four-wheeler.
“Come on, y’all,” Peanut told the twins. “I’ll give you a ride up to the gate.”
Burt and Curt climbed into the truck’s bed. Peanut looked in the rearview at Buck, who was in the shed shooting the bird at the twins for tying him up. He sure as hell wasn’t mad enough to tell his daddy to go screw himself. When Peanut got to the gate, he stopped for the twins to jump down from the bed and waited until Curt opened it up.
“Don’t either one of you move from right here until I get back. Anybody comes in through that gate that you don’t know, you shoot them. Hide over there together,” he said, pointing, “and watch the road. Anybody but me comes through the gate, blow their damned head off.” Peanut wanted the twins on the same side of the gate so in case they got excited and happened to shoot they wouldn’t risk killing one another.
“I mean anybody you don’t know. Strangers or cops.” Peanut drove through the gate, hoping they would do exactly as he told them. The twins were not retarded by a long shot, but they thought differently.
He prayed he hadn’t left any “idiot” loopholes they might fall through and do something disastrous. His father had often said that you can’t make anything foolproof, on account of fools are ingenious at finding new ways to mess things up. Boy, was that the truth.
41
When the man Lucy Dockery learned by eavesdropping was Dixie’s father arrived, she had already gathered herself together and had explored the room using the flashlight. She put her fingers over the lens to filter and concentrate the beam into a weak slit of light. While she’d been exploring, Lucy had touched enough to leave her fingerprints in enough places that no matter how well these people cleaned, they’d never erase them all. The door in her room, which she supposed was a required emergency exit, was padlocked.
The windows in the bedroom were covered with overlapping strips of duct tape to seal out all light. The room’s windows had heavy steel-screen shutters on them. She discovered that the lock hasp was being held fast by a several-inches-long, threaded machine bolt. A flat washer prevented the bolt’s head from falling straight through the steel ring. Getting the screen and the window open was a breeze. Lucy wished they had used a large nail, because a nail would have given her a tool, and she’d have been able to use it to put one of Buck’s eyes out, or give him a facial scar to remember her by. The window behind the mattress was very close to the warehouse’s wall, but she was sure that once she got the screen open she could slip out and drop to the ground without Dixie hearing her. She’d found a spray bottle of human scent killer that she could use. Once she got out of the trailer she would have to somehow seal the dogs in their room before they came out. The noise from the TV and the thick layer of dust should help cover her footsteps. If the dogs went into a barking frenzy and alerted Dixie, Lucy would have to defend herself as best she could with whatever she could lay her hands on. She had never heard the dogs bark or even growl, so she figured they were trained not to. She had to neutralize Dixie, Buck, and maybe the twins as well. She knew that she either had to overpower Dixie and get a key to the warehouse door, or neutralize Dixie and lure whoever was outside the warehouse inside so she could get out through the open door. Then she had to make sure they couldn’t get out and chase her to get a head start.
When Dixie’s father arrived, Lucy hid the flashlight under the mattress and curled up on the bed to play possum when he looked into her room. She hoped she looked worse to him than she was. Buck had bruised her up good, but with scalp wounds, bleeding is often disproportional to severity. If she was going to get away, they had to believe she was incapable of escaping.
Lucy was certain her father had the authorities searching for her and Elijah, but she couldn’t depend on help arriving in time, and couldn’t hold out any hope for a rescue.
Seconds after the man closed the door, he and Dixie moved into the kitchen. Lucy slipped off the bed and put her ear close to the base of the door and
listened to their conversation. It confirmed what Buck had said about her future prospects, but now she knew they were going to kill Elijah, too. Now she no longer had anything to lose.
She didn’t have until Monday. She had a few hours at best. If Dixie’s father got more of the drug they had used on her, she had to act before he returned with it. Once they dosed her with that again, she would never be able to do anything but lie there unconscious until they . . . No. That wasn’t going to happen. At least not the way they planned. She wouldn’t go to her grave quietly or easily.
The makeshift dose that Dixie was going to use on her was a frightening thought, but she’d deal with that when the time came.
She waited for the door to the trailer to close before she sneaked the flashlight back out from under the mattress. Then she turned it on for a moment, slid the window carefully closed, put the flashlight back beneath the mattress, and lay on the bed. She had to make a plan, go through the options one by one.
She forced herself to concentrate, running through a mental list of what she had seen out in the warehouse, and how she could make use of those items for her and Eli’s flight.
She had no idea what was beyond the building’s walls, so once she was outside, she’d have to play it by ear.
Eleven-letter word for exiting hell.
DELIVERANCE
42
Winter Massey felt a visceral sense of relief as he watched Alexa drive off, her lights disappearing as she took the distant curve. The FBI agent part of Alexa was a wall standing between him and any information Click possessed. Winter’s gut told him that Click was the key to the Dockerys. Alexa the FBI agent saw the young man as a citizen wearing the cloak of constitutional rights, and he was protected by her allegiance to her pledge to uphold those laws. She could say she was “off the books” till the cows played cards, but she couldn’t actually be that way. Alexa saw the situation in shades of gray. Weighed against the Dockerys’ lives, Click’s rights didn’t figure into Winter’s formula. When it came to life-and-death situations, Winter saw in jet black lines on bright white paper.
Winter knew what he had to do, and if he succeeded, Alexa would have to learn to live with it. His reward would come when he saw Lucy’s and Elijah’s living faces, and if he had to make a deal with the devil, he would do it. When he looked at Ferny Ernest, he saw a cold-blooded willing participant in a double murder of a woman and her child.
Winter had spent a lot of time talking to a psychiatrist who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder. He had fully opened himself up to the therapy, unburdened himself as completely as he could, but despite that, he still saw every man and the one woman he had killed. They appeared with regularity in his dreams. All he had to do was close his eyes to see them. If Eleanor had lived, maybe he wouldn’t have taken the forks in the road that he had. If he had never gone to Rook Island on that WITSEC assignment, if he had never met Sean, if he had never felt the thirst for justice and retribution, if he hadn’t wandered into a world of CIA killers and mobsters to save her, things would certainly have worked out differently. He wondered if Alexa suspected that she didn’t know him because the years and experiences had altered the boy he had been with her into the man he had become without her. Their closeness had been a long time ago. Alexa knew it was true.
Alexa was somebody from the past who called once in a blue moon, when she felt nostalgic or got the big blue meanies. She was a Christmas card and a birthday card on Rush’s birthday.
Things change.
Life takes up all your time.
You put off making contact and that becomes emotional distance.
He and Alexa would never again be close friends. He had his heart heavily invested in a place that had no defined role for her.
Intentions not acted upon become regrets.
Intentions acted upon become regrets.
Winter checked the extra magazines, zipped his windbreaker halfway up so he could get to the SIG, put on a Gore-Tex ball cap, and climbed out of his truck.
After crossing the street, he circled the neighboring house and kept to the bushes until he arrived at Click’s house.
Showtime.
43
Serge Sarnov parked the BMW beside a dark SUV, which contained three of Max’s men. He knew real talent when he saw it, and Randall’s guys were bright boys who didn’t require rubber gloves to dive into wet work. Serge lit a cigarette and cut off the headlights. The wipers cleared the windshield at one-second intervals.
“That boy’s all right,” Serge said, meaning Click. In Serge’s opinion the young Smoot was a koi swimming in a sewer with a school of shit-sucking catfish.
“He’s going to tell his father,” Max said. “Soon as he gets over seeing the barrel of your gun, he’ll call Peanut. He doesn’t really believe you can take his old man out of play.”
Serge nodded. “You think I may have overestimated his sense of greed? I don’t think so, but . . .” He tapped the wheel with his fingertips. “That boy has real potential.”
“A lot can happen to complicate this deal. Peanut is smart, vicious, and he could complicate things. That bunch doesn’t operate by any playbook but their own,” Max warned him.
“The Smoots are animals,” Serge said. “Click knows it. I think he will look into the future and make his decision based on that. He isn’t anything like the others.”
“Would you?” Max looked over at the SUV, the dark silhouettes of the killers inside. “Turn on your blood, turn down a known quantity for some money in the future he thinks he can get anyway?”
“He isn’t me,” Serge replied.
“Would you turn on your firm?” Max asked. “If someone came in out of the dark and said, ‘You’re too bright to work for Intermat for chump change. I’m going to take Intermat down. Join me or die.’ ”
Serge didn’t answer. He was considering the value of Click weighed against the potential loss of this deal to his employers. The Smoot end of Laughlin’s empire accounted for huge profits. Tens of millions over the next couple of years. He wanted the Smoots’ action, needed it. Losing it now would put his life on the line, because his employers had already entered the figures into their projections. Laughlin had agreed to watch the Smoots be pushed aside, but the American probably wouldn’t be sorry to see Serge fail. Maybe he should get rid of Click just in case he misjudged the boy. A bird in the hand . . .
“Let’s do this,” Max said. “We can keep Click under wraps until this operation is over. We can take him to the house and after Peanut and the others are done in, he’ll be easy to bring over.”
Serge said, “I was going to suggest the same course of action.” Randall was indeed a very smart man.
“After the Dockerys are dead, we can deal with Peanut and his family and let the trail end at their corpses.”
“I’m listening,” Serge said.
Max laid out a plan that brought a smile to Serge’s lips. He inhaled and considered it. Max Randall never disappointed. He had a strategic mind and made life-and-death decisions effortlessly. He would do fine for the firm as long as he played it straight, and Serge was sure he was intelligent enough to do just that.
“Take two men, get Click, and I will meet you all back at the house. Use whatever force you deem necessary to find out if he made any calls to his father, but keep his brain intact. That part of him we need in good working order. Use your best judgment.”
“I’ll handle it,” Max said, slipping from the car.
Serge dropped the window long enough to flick his lit cigarette out into the wetness of the night.
44
Winter Massey saw that Click was still sitting where he’d been earlier—in the recliner, still tapping his sock feet to the music, watching naked girls on a stage gyrate to rock tunes the dancers were too young to have listened to growing up. The choice of musical accompaniment was more for its nostalgic value to the middle-aged skin-worshipping congregation that regularly attended their local branches of t
he First Church of the Brass Pole. People who were younger than the men who actually put donations inside the dancers’ garters probably watched the DVDs and videotapes without listening to the music.
Winter wondered if Click had called his father to tell him about Sarnov’s nocturnal visit and job offer, or if he was weighing that offer while the Dockerys were awaiting death. It really didn’t make any difference. Winter looked in at the large TV screen, frowned, and circled the house. As he passed the rolling garbage can in the shed, he spotted the corner of a pizza box sticking out from under the lid. He pulled out the box, strode around to the front door, took out his SIG, and rang the doorbell. He pulled the bill of his cap down to shadow his eyes.
He didn’t hear Click coming, but the porch light came on and the front door opened enough so that Winter could see that the young Smoot had put on a plaid bathrobe over his T-shirt and boxers. The chain on the door was a substantial model, which might not give without allowing Click a chance to fire through the wood. This kid would probably have some sort of weapon at hand, especially given the earlier Sarnov/Randall visit. With a little luck on Click’s side and a decent-caliber round, Winter might find himself lying on his back bleeding out—an armed home-invading stranger. Taking the chance wasn’t necessary.
“What?” Click growled through the crack.
“Pizza,” Winter said. The rain striking the concrete walkway behind him helped mute his voice.
“I didn’t order any pizza.”
“Fourteen dollars and twenty-six cents.”
“I didn’t order it.”
“If you’re standing inside two-two-one-five you did.”
“It isn’t my pizza. I got one from you last night. Maybe your cheap-ass computer put me back on for one tonight.”
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