“She was on to me! She’s a psychic! I waited on her at the buffet, and she told me she knew everything about me. Then she came back down later because she’d forgotten to pick up her credit card from the tray and when I gave it to her she told me she saw me surrounded by a bunch of angry, crying women! What was I supposed to do?” The voice of Bob the waiter came from in front of her, to the right. Maybe twelve feet away.
She didn’t dare look.
“Who pays attention to a fucking psychic?” Hagan snapped. “There’s no such thing as psychics! They’re not real!”
Charlie heard the clomp of footsteps, saw a pair of men’s brown dress shoes and the lower third of a pair of well-pressed khaki trousers walk past—Hagan—and held her breath.
He kept going.
Bob said, “This one is! She was working with the FBI! With him.”
Charlie couldn’t help it: something about the tone of that last made her shoot a cautious glance toward Bob. What she saw when she did caused her heart to clutch.
He was aiming a vicious kick at Tony, who lay slumped on the concrete floor by the door as if he’d been carried inside and unceremoniously dumped. The thump as Bob’s shoe connected with Tony’s back made her wince inwardly. What was more frightening was that Tony didn’t even flinch.
Oh, God, was he dead? She wondered frantically. His shirt and jacket were shiny red with blood, but not a lot of blood had pooled beneath him, which terrified her because she was afraid it meant that he’d already almost bled out. His eyes were closed, he was limp and motionless, and his skin was the grayish pale color of death or impending death.
No, Charlie raged. Then, Please let him not be dead.
A semi-calming thought reared its head: If he were dead, I’d be able to see his spirit.
Unless, of course, she couldn’t. She couldn’t see all of the newly, violently dead. Only those who didn’t go immediately into the light.
As decent and upright as Tony was, the light would have come for him right away, she was sure.
She risked another glance. Tony lay maybe ten feet away from the edge of her platform, totally inert. If he was breathing she couldn’t tell it, but she refused to allow herself to think that he was dead.
Saying another silent prayer for Tony, she forced herself to focus, and snuck more quick glances at her surroundings: they were inside a building, one of the three that made up the abandoned kennel, presumably. This one was about the size of a three-car garage, with an open space in the middle, which was where she was, and floodlights (currently dark) and camera equipment set up on tripods near the front wall, which was maybe twelve feet away. Cages, big ones, dog run–type cages with rusty wire walls that reached the ceiling, were attached to the walls in rows along either side of her. Most of them seemed to be full of boxes and assorted junk. One held old mattresses: she didn’t even like to think what they had possibly been used for. The walls and floor were concrete block and poured concrete, respectively. There was a single metal door near Tony, and a few grimy windows that had been boarded up. The lighting was sparse and functional. It was hot—the rumble she could hear was a single, window-mounted air-conditioning unit that apparently didn’t work very well—and smelled of ancient urine.
“You just keep on imagining that vacation.” Michael was back. He was all hard-eyed and tight-mouthed and badass, and his powerful body was practically the poster child for formidable masculine strength. Simply having him there beside her made her feel safer, which was stupid, she knew. Ectoplasm equaled no help in this world.
Their eyes met for the briefest of seconds.
I know there’s nothing you can do, she absolved him silently.
“I’ve got you,” he said, his voice grim.
“Anyway, what’s it to you if I kill her?” Bob moved away from Tony, out of Charlie’s sight. The quick glance she’d gotten was enough for her to recognize him: the thirtyish, dark-haired, good-looking, cleavage-ogling waiter from the breakfast buffet. His attire of jeans and a casual shirt reminded her that he’d had the day off. If I kill her—his turn of phrase had almost gotten past her. Hope fluttered: was Tam not yet dead? “You’re Dynasty Film’s silent partner, remember? You don’t want to know.”
“You’re right, I don’t want to know,” Hagan responded viciously. “I was Dynasty Film’s silent partner until you went and fucked it up. Only it looks like I can’t be a silent partner anymore because you’re going to ruin us both. You couldn’t just make porn? You had to go murdering fucking women and filming it and screwing the whole thing up? You stupid fuck.”
“We’re making a lot of money off those snuff films. You said yourself, the international market is huge. And who are you calling a stupid fuck? I don’t have to take that shit from you.” Bob was bristling.
“I call it like I see it, stupid fuck. If I hadn’t come over to warn you and been in here today when these assholes pulled up and gone out and circled around behind them and gotten the drop on Mr. Special Agent over there, your ass would be busted right now. And you’d be dragging me into it, I’ve got no doubt.”
“Fuck you!”
A splashing sound made Charlie frown. Or, rather, start to frown. Frowning hurt so much it distracted her. She almost whimpered. The pain in her head came back like a baseball bat descending on her cranium. She’d been shot: not just in the shoulder but in the head. Right, I remember. The impact had been enough to knock her unconscious, but—she wasn’t dead, and her senses seemed to be intact, so it obviously wasn’t too bad. She thought the bullet had grazed the left side of her forehead, up near her hairline, maybe deflecting off her skull. She was bleeding; now that she thought about it, she could feel the warm stickiness of blood in her hair, see the occasional fresh drop splat near her feet.
Something to worry about later. If I live long enough.
“So where’s your girlfriend?” Hagan’s question struck Charlie as almost too casual in tone for the circumstances.
“Barbie?” Bob sounded nervous. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my stepsister. My mom and her dad were married for about five years a long time ago.”
“Whatever.” Hagan’s tone brushed that aside. “I thought her name was Destiny.”
“I called her Barbie, from when we were kids. My mom used to make me play dolls with her. Destiny had Barbie, and she wanted me to have Ken, but I stuck with G.I. Joe instead. So I ended up calling her Barbie, and she called me Joe.”
“So where is she?” Hagan asked with barely concealed impatience. “We’re about to get this mess cleaned up. We don’t want her out there, some damned loose end shooting off her mouth.”
“Oh.” Bob hesitated. “You don’t have to worry about that. She’s dead.”
“She’s dead?” There was no mistaking the surprise in Hagan’s voice. “Did you kill her? You turn your own stepsister into a snuff film, you sick fuck?”
“No!” Bob’s voice quivered. “At least—that’s not why. The last girl I took scratched her or something, so she beat the hell out of her. Beat her up too bad for me to use her. It pissed me off, so I …”
His voice trailed off.
“You killed her,” Hagan finished for him, talking over more of the splashing sounds that were starting to worry Charlie a lot. “That’s one thing you did right, anyway. Come on, help me spread this stuff around. We need to get this wrapped up before someone comes looking for the damned agent.”
“Wait a minute, you’re not going to just kill the girls, are you?” Bob sounded like he was reacting to something he was seeing that he didn’t much like. “That’s a total waste. The FBI bitch is already hanging up there. We can do her quick, then do the others right after. The cameras are right there. It won’t take long, and we’ll have three more movies we can post to the site.”
Three more movies? Charlie’s eyes widened as she registered the implication of that. She couldn’t stop herself from risking a look toward where Bob and Hagan were talking, which was behind her and to her left.
The first thing she saw was Tam’s red hair fanned out against the dull gray floor.
She caught her breath. Her heart leaped with thanksgiving.
Tam lay curled on her side in a corner of one of the dog runs, her pink jumpsuit in shreds. She was unmoving, and her hair obscured her face, but Charlie was almost positive she was unconscious rather than dead. In the same run, lying curled up next to her, was a small, black-haired woman Charlie instantly realized had to be Giselle. Like Tam, she looked battered and unconscious, but alive.
Thank you, God. Lena would be ecstatic. For one brief moment, unblemished joy coursed through Charlie’s veins.
Then reality hit again, and terror came rushing back with it.
It wasn’t like Tam and Giselle had just been rescued. They were still going to die. The only difference was that she and Tony, if he was still alive, were now going to die along with them.
Even more horribly than any of them could have dreamed.
That splashing sound? That was Hagan sloshing some kind of clear liquid through the wire gate at Tam and Giselle. Charlie couldn’t see the container, but she could smell the liquid: gasoline.
As she identified it, her heart started to slam against her breastbone. Her blood ran cold. The room seemed to spin. Of all the ways she could think of to die, burning to death ranked right up there with the worst.
“Quit looking over there. Keep your head down. The last thing you want to do is draw their attention.” Michael’s tone was fierce. He was back where she could see him again, standing beside her on the platform studying the spot above her head where the cuffs were secured. His mouth compressed and his nostrils flared as he did so, which Charlie, with a pang of fear that told her how much she had secretly counted on him for rescue, took as a silent acknowledgment of defeat. What he said next put the seal on it: “Where the hell are Pebbles and Bam-Bam?”
“We’re out of time,” Hagan replied to Bob curtly. He gestured at the can Bob was holding. “Pour some of that on the floor, then throw the rest of it on those boxes over there. I don’t want to leave any evidence behind.”
Charlie’s mouth went dry as Bob did as he was told. Something she did—a spasmodic jerk, say, from the stress of discovering that she, Tony, Tam, and Giselle were about to be barbecued alive—made something above her head give a metal-on-metal clank.
Bob looked her way. And met her eyes.
Charlie froze with horror.
“Why, hello there, pretty girl.” Putting the gas can on the ground, Bob walked toward her. He was smiling. His all-American good looks coupled with that sharklike smile made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. His eyes—they were a soft gray—had a gleam in them that she’d seen before: that of a predator locking on to prey. They were the eyes of a monster.
This is what a serial killer looks like.
She went cold all over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Fuck,” Michael groaned.
“We don’t have time for you to start messing around.” Hagan’s voice was impatient. Charlie didn’t look his way. She was too busy staring in mortal terror at Bob, who had stopped in front of her and was looking her over like a slab of meat.
She sucked in a sickened breath as he put his hand on her breast, feeling the size and shape of it through the layers of her blouse and bra. Somewhere—where he’d gone she couldn’t have said; all her attention was focused on the madman in front of her—she could hear Michael cursing a blue streak.
“Nice boobies,” Bob leered, and squeezed. Fear and revulsion surged inside her in equal measure. Her chest knotted. Her stomach churned.
“The FBI is on the way. They know who you are. Killing us will just make things go worse for you.” Now that playing possum had failed to work, the only weapon left to her was her words. Charlie was proud of how calm and sure she sounded. No one would guess that her blood had congealed with terror or that her throat was threatening to close up.
“Nah,” Bob said. He fondled her, watching her face with avid attention. She knew what he was doing: feeding off her helplessness, her loathing. “When you’ve killed as many women as I have, if the cops get you, nothing can make things go worse.”
“Hey, Bobby.” Hagan walked into view. Bob turned his head to look at him. Hagan was holding a gun: without another word he jerked it up and fired.
Bob’s head exploded.
Blood sprayed like a scarlet fountain. Charlie screamed, what was left of Bob hit the ground in front of her. Hagan stepped over the corpse and met her gaze.
“I got a real problem with leaving loose ends,” he told her almost apologetically, and pointed his gun at her face.
Charlie gasped. Her life flashed before her eyes. Cold sweat poured over her in a wave. As time seemed to suspend and everything shifted into a kind of horror movie slow motion, she watched Hagan’s eyes narrow, watched his knuckle whiten as it contracted on the trigger.
The thought that petrified her was: I won’t hear the next bang, because I’ll be dead.
Galvanized, she screamed like a steam whistle, tried to kick him—and then, silent and deadly, Tony leaped on him from behind, sending Hagan, who yelled in surprise, to the ground. Tony viciously punched him, straddling his back to keep him down. Heart in throat, Charlie watched as Hagan bucked, trying to throw him off—and then Tony locked his arms around Hagan’s head and gave it a brutal twist. The sharp little crack that she knew was Hagan’s neck snapping was followed almost instantly by the thunderclap-loud bang she’d thought she wouldn’t be alive to hear.
Hagan’s gun had fired. But the bullet had missed her. The bad guys were dead. And Tony? Shaking, breathing like she had been running for miles, Charlie looked down at the security man’s corpse and the FBI agent who had just saved her life, calling to him fearfully, “Tony?”
Tony slowly got to his feet. The relief she felt as he did was so profound she was weak with it. His face was ashen and his clothes were soaked with blood, but his eyes were bright and alive as they met hers.
Something about the look in his made hers widen. She knew who he was, knew what had happened, even before he replied with a dry, “Not quite, babe.”
“Michael?” It might be Tony’s body, but what she was seeing in his eyes was Michael’s soul. Even as fear for him over the consequences he might suffer began to rear its ugly head, she was dizzyingly grateful to have been saved.
“Yeah.” He looked beyond her and his face changed. “Holy shit.”
His tone coupled with a funny whooshing sound behind her made every muscle in her body tighten with dread.
“What is it?” She tried to swivel around, tried to see what was happening behind her even as he crouched beside Bob’s body, but she saw nothing wrong. A wave of heat coupled with a crackling sound gave the lie to that. She knew what was happening instinctively, viscerally, even before the smell reached her nostrils: fire.
“Michael.” Charlie’s heart sped up until it felt like it would pound its way out of her chest. Then Michael/Tony was back beside her, a set of keys in his hand as he reached above her head.
“I got you, babe,” he said as he had before, and she felt the warm strength of his hand gripping her wrists an instant before he freed her.
She dropped. Her knees refused to support her, and she folded until she was crouching on the hard concrete floor. Bob’s headless body and the pulpy mess of his head were right in front of her. Hagan, his head twisted at an unnatural angle, was just a little to the right. Her stomach convulsed as she looked at them, but there was no time.
“Get up.” Michael/Tony was beside her, hauling her to her feet. For a second his arm wrapped around her and she leaned against him as her knees rebelled against carrying her weight, watching aghast as flames raced around the room, licking over the trail of gasoline. Then her eyes flew to her friend and Lena’s sister trapped and unconscious in the wire cage.
“Tam. Giselle,” she cried. The fire would reach them soon.
; “Get out of here.” He pushed her away from him, and she stumbled toward the only door. The fire was growing as it ran around the edge of the room; the door would be blocked in a matter of minutes. “Go. I’ll get them.”
With a glance that made sure she could move on her own, he ran toward the women in the cage, racing the fire toward them. The flames were growing taller, orange and red peaks that leaped toward the ceiling, and the heat and smell were intense. Charlie took one look at what was happening and stumbled after him. Her legs were wobbly, and her feet felt like they were made of pins and needles, but there was no way she was leaving them to get out—or not—on their own.
She reached Michael as he locked both hands on the gate of the dog run and literally tore it off its hinges. Flinging it aside, he spotted her.
“I told you to leave.”
He screamed it over his shoulder as he leaped inside the dog run and she followed him in. At the same time the flames found the mattresses. The roar as they went up was the scariest thing Charlie had ever heard.
“Tam, Tam, wake up!” Charlie screamed by way of an answer. Having reached her friend, she frantically shook her.
“Go. I’ll get her.” Michael scooped up Giselle and flung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He turned toward Tam. No way was he going to be able to bend down and get her, too, without losing Giselle.
“Tam!” Charlie shrieked.
“Wh—what?” Tam blinked and sat up.
“Get up! Stand up!”
Michael reached Tam’s side, and between the two of them he and Charlie managed to haul her upright. She swayed, clearly not fully conscious, but Charlie steadied her as Michael heaved her over his shoulder. He staggered a little under the weight of both of them, and Charlie was reminded that this was Tony’s body, not Michael’s, and that it was badly wounded, to boot.
Her Last Whisper Page 34