Compulsion
Page 29
“So we have to get through another metal door?”
“It’s corroded. I can see strips of moonlight.”
Bits of hope. “All right.” Barrie licked her lips and swallowed hard. “Let me try climbing through.”
Eight looked at her like she had lost her mind. “You’re not going anywhere without me. Let’s clear the rest of this.”
“It’ll take too long to remove enough bricks for you to fit through. I can be back here with help before then. God knows what Cassie is doing, now that she’s had time to think. And Pru has to be frantic.” Barrie wriggled between Eight and the wall and kissed him quickly. “Can you give me a boost?”
He caught the collar of her shirt and kissed her, long and deep so that the warmth of his lips turned to fire and promises. He pulled away so slowly, she felt like there was still a live strand of energy running between them, holding them together.
“Be very, very careful.” He brushed her cheek with the back of his finger. “I don’t like you leaving.”
“I’m not the one who’s leaving, baseball guy.”
“Maybe I’ve changed my mind. It’s amazing how fast you figure out your priorities when you’re under pressure.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“We’ll work things out. Whatever happens.”
Barrie’s answering smile was shaky. It frightened her how much one person could matter to another, how a whole life could depend on a few simple words. “I thought you were going to stop reading me?”
“It’s not always about what you want, you know.” He kissed her again. “Now go on, Bear. Bring back the cavalry. Or at least someone with a reciprocating saw.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Barrie wiggled through the hole, and hunched nearly in half to keep from knocking her head on the lid covering the stairwell. Ankle-deep in mud, she tried not to think of snakes. Thank god for Pru’s ugly rubber Wellingtons.
The cover didn’t want to budge. Feet planted more firmly, Barrie pressed her shoulders up against the cover and used every bit of strength in her knees, thighs, and back to strain against the lid. It rose an inch, two inches. A piece broke off, and her left shoulder cracked through. The rest of the cover clanged into place again, and she was back where she’d started. Or maybe not. With the heel of her hand she hammered at the edge she had broken.
“Wrap this around your fist.” Eight stripped off his shirt and threw it at her.
Barrie jabbed at the metal, and another piece broke off. She kept at it, hitting and prying until she had cleared a space big enough to fit through. Then she pushed herself out. Her tired muscles rejoiced when she could finally stand.
Under the heavy tree cover, it was hard to get her bearings in the moonlight, but she decided she had to be in the woods between Beaufort Hall and Colesworth Place. Leaves, mud, and thick underbrush hid the stairwell where she had just emerged. She could have walked over it a hundred times and never realized it was there. And how many people ever went into these woods? The demilitarized zone. Not the Beauforts, and probably not the Colesworths, either.
Some thirty feet through the trees, she saw the glint of the water and heard its murmur. Across the river, she could make out the Watson dock upstream, with every light blazing in the house and garden. No light shone from the Beaufort side, but the woods were thicker there. Anyway, Seven had to know Eight was missing by now. He was probably with Pru since Eight’s boat was on the Watson side.
“I’m going to get Cassie’s rowboat and go for help. Don’t go anywhere.” She tossed Eight’s shirt back down to him.
“Where am I going to go?” The frustration growled in Eight’s voice.
Underbrush clutched at Barrie’s clothes and reopened the scrapes on her hands as she ran toward the Colesworth dock. Twigs snapped, leaves crunched, and her breath came heavily, distorting her hearing. She hoped the racket she was making would at least scare away the snakes.
The trees cleared to a verge of grass sloping toward the river. Cassie’s boat bobbed alongside the speedboat Barrie had seen her first night at Watson’s Landing. She felt a renewed surge of energy and relief that almost cut through the familiar dread of having to navigate the water. She lengthened her stride.
A man jumped out of the boat with his arms full of small brown packages. He looked dead at her, and they both stopped short.
Barrie recognized him. She’d seen him talking with Wyatt at the marina. Moonlight gleamed off his shaven scalp, and she shivered as she remembered the tattooed face inked onto the back of his head. More tattoos snaked down his arms and up his neck from beneath the black T-shirt.
He shouted something in Spanish and threw the packages back into the boat. Then he sprinted toward her.
Instinct sent Barrie running back toward the trees. Which would lead back to Eight. Changing her mind, she cut toward the river instead, and managed to splash through five yards of shin-high marsh before iron-muscled arms lifted her off the ground.
Screaming, she kicked and twisted. Jabbed with her elbows. The man’s hand slapped over her mouth, grinding her lips against her teeth.
She tasted blood and smelled something vinegary and acrid. Wrenching herself sideways, she kicked harder, caught him in the knee, and screamed.
His fist slammed into her cheek. She fell and inhaled a mouthful of river. Jarred and breathless, with stars spinning behind her eyes, she came up coughing. She scrambled to her knees.
“What the hell?”
That voice. Wyatt’s voice. Barrie’s head shot up, trying to call out to him for help. The guy behind her jerked her back, his palm pressed against her mouth again. And what were the odds that Wyatt would help her?
Slim to none.
In the area beneath the slave cabins, Wyatt swung himself out of a hole and slammed the lid. He ran toward Barrie. The moonlight gleamed on a dark object in his hand.
A gun.
Barrie began to shake.
The tattooed man kicked her in the ribs and sent her back into the water. She came up sputtering, and he grabbed the back of her shirt and hauled her to her feet. Water blurred her eyes. She couldn’t catch her breath. Not deeply enough.
“You really are like your mother, aren’t you?” Wyatt stopped in front of her, his face twisted into a snarl. “Can’t stay the hell out of the way. I’d have figured you could take a hint.”
The man holding her ground his thumb and forefinger into Barrie’s cheek and spoke to Wyatt in heavily accented English: “You know this girl?”
Something like fear flashed in Wyatt’s eyes. “She doesn’t matter, Ernesto. Drown her. Shoot her. Maybe that will be more effective than fire. Hell, I don’t know.” Wyatt gave an exasperated wave of the gun. “She and her bitch of a mother should both have been dead seventeen years ago, but here she is. Take her out to the boat. We’ll bring her with us. Do it fast. I don’t like all those lights on across the river. We need to finish up.”
Barrie aimed another kick at Wyatt’s knee. Her foot connected with bone. He grunted.
Ernesto turned toward Watson’s Landing. His hand slackened over Barrie’s lips. She wrenched her head and bit down, teeth grinding on flesh, blood pooling metallically in her mouth.
“Madre de dios!” He snatched his hand away.
Barrie spat and darted toward the river. Ernesto tripped her. She stumbled to one knee.
“Hold it.” Wyatt’s voice was cold. “Don’t think I won’t shoot you right here.”
His gun clicked. Barrie looked back, and his face was emotionless. As if she didn’t matter at all. As if she were only a minor inconvenience.
How loud was a gunshot? Would Wyatt really risk shooting her if he thought someone might hear?
Barrie’s breath came in shallow pants of panic, and she’d broken out in a clammy sweat. Her legs didn’t want to let her stand back up. She needed time to think.
“You’re the one who killed my father, aren’t you? It was you who set the fire.” The words grated in her t
hroat, what he’d said tonight and what Lula had written in her letter, the way Wyatt had wanted to know what Lula had said about him . . . The pieces had finally fallen into place.
Wyatt’s head recoiled on his shoulders. “It wasn’t me. You want to know who killed him? Your mother. Her damn Watson righteousness. Wade was too softhearted to take care of her. To do what had to be done.”
“To kill her, you mean?” Hysteria hovered at the edges of Barrie’s brain, but her breath was coming more easily. It shocked her how calm she sounded. How much easier it was to say “kill” now that she had said it before. She had to keep Wyatt talking. She waved her hand at the speedboat and whatever was hidden in the hole down the bank. “Lula caught you both doing this, smuggling drugs, didn’t she?”
Wyatt shook his head slowly, more in disgust than denial. “You can’t outrun the cartel. Wade was stupid to try.” He glanced sideways at Ernesto, then pointed the gun from Barrie to the boat. “Walk,” he said. “I’m not going to ask you again.”
“You won’t shoot me here,” Barrie said, with no confidence whatsoever.
“Then I’ll knock you out and carry you to the boat. Your choice.”
There had to be a way out of this. Why wouldn’t Barrie’s brain work? She held her palms up toward Wyatt in surrender. “Let me go home, Uncle Wyatt. Please? I swear I won’t tell anyone.”
Wyatt snorted. “You think I’m that stupid, girl? But at least you’re trying. I’ll give you credit for that. All your mother did was scream.”
“Until you shut her up,” Barrie guessed.
“All I did was hit her. She howled like I was committing murder.”
“And then?” She saw the answer in his face, the way his eyes slid away, the way his muscles thickened with strain. “Wade went after you for hurting Lula, didn’t he? That’s why you killed him.”
“It wasn’t my fault. Lula slammed herself into the bedroom, and Wade barreled into me—I had to defend myself. And the stupid candle of Lula’s set fire to the curtain. I tried to drag him out, but the whole place was a firetrap. I barely got out myself.”
“So you left him. You left him, and you left my mother in the bedroom.” Barrie planted her feet in the middle of the dock. “You left them to die, and that’s your idea of not your fault?”
“We could have had a sweet operation out there, Wade and me. If the bitch really loved him, she would have understood he had changed his mind.”
“About what?”
Wyatt glanced darkly at Ernesto. “You don’t quit on the cartel,” he said.
Wyatt jumped onto the dock. Barrie’s stomach lurched. Acid spilled into her mouth, and she barely bent over before she was heaving, the taste of bile chasing away the metallic sweetness of the blood from her lip.
Ernesto watched her in disgust. “Get her onto the boat,” he said. “We have to go.”
Wyatt moved toward Barrie. She opened her mouth to protest, and no sound came out.
“I’ll shoot you if you scream. The shot won’t be any louder than that.” Wyatt raised the gun.
Barrie finally understood why deer froze in headlights. Her muscles weighed five hundred pounds apiece. Her legs refused to work. Wyatt gave her a shove, then jerked her arm behind her back, marched her to the end of the dock, and pushed her into the boat. She fell to her knees, her empty stomach heaving.
“Not in the damn boat.” Ernesto caught her with his knee and knocked her head into the edge of one of the seats.
By the time she could see again, Ernesto had the engine started. Was the motor quieter than normal? Too quiet? Or was there something the matter with Barrie’s ears?
She grabbed the seat and used it to pull herself to her feet. Ernesto picked up the last of the brown, plastic-wrapped packages he’d thrown into the boat, and tossed them into an open storage hold that stank like eighteen kinds of animals had peed in it. He dropped a false bottom over the drugs, threw in an anchor and a bunch of rope, closed the lid, and settled a seat cushion back on top.
Wyatt reversed away from the dock and out into the river. Barrie tried to calculate how close he would get to the Watson side before he motored the boat forward. She needed to minimize the distance she had to swim if she was going to have any chance at all. But maybe it was better to try while Wyatt and Ernesto were both still busy. Realistically, what chance did she have either way? The thought of swimming revved her pulse, and she took a deep breath that was laced with sage-scented smoke.
Smoke.
Midnight?
Heart galloping, Barrie looked toward the Watson woods. The Fire Carrier was coming. Already flames lapped at the shadows between the trees. She scrambled up onto the seat.
“Get down from there,” Ernesto commanded. “Wyatt, get her down.”
Wyatt grabbed for Barrie, but the Fire Carrier had reached the edge of the marsh, and he was looking straight at her. The paint of his red-and-black mask gleamed by the light of the flames he held. Barrie could feel him questioning. She had never wanted anything as much as she wanted to be at Watson’s Landing right that moment.
The Fire Carrier gave a nod and spread his hands. Lines of flame streaked toward the boat.
Wyatt swore. Ernesto turned. “What the hell?”
Back by the Colesworth dock, someone shouted. Eight’s voice? Barrie couldn’t turn to look. The fire reached the boat, and she dove into the water.
Flames passed over her, through her, but where she expected to feel heat, she felt only water. She flailed and tried to propel herself upward. Pru’s rubber boots had become dead weight, pulling at her swollen ankle. She struggled to get them off, and dog-paddled underwater, her every muscle stiff with fear. Her lungs seared with the half breath she had taken, and she pushed toward the surface.
An explosion rocked the air, followed by an even bigger boom. Something sharp hit her in the shoulder, knocking her forward. The water surged, swelled, tumbled her until she didn’t know which way was up. Her left arm went numb.
Her ears rang. Everything was muffled. Opening her eyes, she stopped struggling. The churning water above her was lit with an eerie orange glow. She thrust upward, thrashing as she broke the surface and gasped for air. Was that blood pouring off her arm? Blood. No, don’t focus on the blood.
She cringed from the heat of flames that had become very real, and she fought to stay afloat. Black smoke billowed in gusts, and the air smelled like burning fuel. Pockets of flaming debris floated on oil-slicked water from the remains of Wyatt’s boat.
Where was she? She turned to look behind her.
She wasn’t even halfway back across the river. A burning wall that loomed in front of her as though held at bay by some invisible barrier marked the midpoint. As if the Fire Carrier, having deviated from his nightly ritual to send actual fire streaking toward the boat, had then gone back and finished surrounding Watson’s Landing in magical flames.
At least, Barrie hoped they were only magical. Otherwise how was she going to make it through them?
How was she going to make it at all?
But she couldn’t let Eight down. Couldn’t let Pru down. Or Mark. Mark.
I’m right here with you, baby girl.
She was going crazy. Mark’s voice sounded so clear.
Don’t you even think about giving in, you hear me? You’re halfway there already.
Halfway. She was halfway—and suddenly the water was whispering the way it had in the fountain, and she was buoyant. The current carried her as though hands held her up. Crowd-surfing without the crowd.
If she survived, she was going to have to try that sometime. Experience an actual concert, feel the pump of the music for herself instead of watching Rock of Ages on her ass from the couch.
Swim, baby girl. Move your arms, kick your legs. You can do it. Fight now. Fight and don’t you ever stop fighting. Mark’s voice sounded stronger than it had in days. In weeks. That strength and the surge of the water pushed Barrie toward the shore until her feet touched bottom.
She was back on the Watson side.
And Wyatt? Ernesto? Where were they?
She had to get out of the water. She stumbled toward the bank and pulled up short.
In the rushes before her, the Fire Carrier stood close enough that the war paint on his face and chest shone slick with grease. Veins stood out on his arms, and every lean muscle of his chest and stomach seemed defined and ready to spring into action. But apart from the feathers of his cloak and headdress stirring in the night air, he was motionless. He watched her.
Barrie had thought him older when she’d seen him from a distance. He wasn’t much older than she was, though. Not much older than Eight.
“Thank you.” Holding her injured arm to her side, she drew herself up to face him.
He watched her. His eyes reflected the fire and darkness. They looked sad somehow, and tired. Barrie thought of Luke’s spirit reaching for Twila, hoping to touch her all those years. How long had the Fire Carrier performed his midnight ritual night after night?
He wanted something. She felt that with even more certainty now, but before she could find a way to frame a question, he inclined his head and turned toward the Watson woods. Fingertips skimming the surface, he waded through the water while flames sped toward him from across the river, running up his arms until he glowed as brightly as the moon. It was only when he reached the bank that she realized she could almost see through him.
She wondered what would happen if she ran after him and begged him to tell her what he wanted from her, asked him to explain the binding and whatever bargain she had made. She splashed after him, but her body was shutting down, shock making her slow and lethargic.