She shook off the memory, realizing she’d drifted away, made herself horribly vulnerable. It was only then that she realized what was missing. Even after what she’d told Cunningham and everything that had happened, there were no cops anywhere and no sign that they’d even bothered to do the same thing that she was trying to do now. She felt a flare of anger, a literal white-hot flash up her spine. She started toward her car and then changed her mind, decided to leave it where it was. There was no guarantee that the man’s house would be empty, and she didn’t need to announce herself by just pulling into his driveway—bad enough that she’d done it here. She started across the field.
The grass was high, thick, and very wet, and she was soaked and shivering with cold before she’d gone twenty yards. Except for the occasional clump of brush there was little cover and it was impossible to stay low enough to avoid being seen and still be able to make progress through the heavy grass. If anyone inside the house bothered to look outside they’d see her coming.
She stopped for a moment, looking back at her car. If Emily was in that house they might have to leave quickly. She hesitated, then kept going. She had to get in there, worry about the rest later.
For a few moments she concentrated on keeping as low as she could, then suddenly realized how close she was to the house and that she still had no plan. She made for the ramshackle shed that flanked one side of the property, using it to screen her approach from anyone looking out of the house, There was a small window, a quadrangle of four dirty panes, high on the wall of the shed and she stretched up to look inside. The interior was dark but she could see enough to know that no one was in there.
She looked on the ground for something she could use as a weapon. Nothing. She went quickly around to the door on the front of the shed. It was locked. She was exposed to view from the house and she couldn’t think of a way to break into the shed without making too much noise. She knew she was wasting time.
He wasn’t sure what made him glance out the window—a sudden movement outside, maybe, more likely the attenuated awareness that he always felt when he was close to a kill. He stepped sideways, out of view from the window, and then moved quickly to the window frame and looked outside.
He’d been expecting to see Billy Dancer, maybe even Frank. He wasn’t prepared for Adrienne Simmonds. She was soaked, her hair plastered tight to her head and her nylon jacket clinging to that marvelous body. She was moving around the edge of the outbuilding, looking up at the house. Even through the heavy rain he could see that her eyes were wide and that she looked confused and afraid. That made him feel good, powerful—he’d succeeded in shattering that arrogant reserve, made her human, weak, like everyone else.
He had a gun—he’d found it standing up in Dancer’s pantry downstairs, an old bolt action Springfield, of all things—but he didn’t need or want it for her. He looked back at Emily, still unconscious on the bed. He kept the rifle with him but put the knife away in the top drawer of the scarred dresser and went downstairs. He’d never done two before, not at once.
Adrienne had almost reached the back door of the house when the door opened suddenly and a man stepped out on the porch and waved a gloved hand, gesturing her inside. She stared dumbly at him—he was big, heavy, but not the man she remembered from the incident in the schoolyard, not the man she was expecting. Somehow there was nothing intimidating about his size or the way he carried himself—his bulk conveyed the kind of settled reassurance that a lot of big men have, men who are good neighbors and service club members and who play golf on weekends. He waved her in again, more urgently this time. She didn’t feel threatened by the gesture at all—there was something conspiratorial about it, like he needed her help. He looked authoritative and somehow familiar. She started forward, then hesitated.
“Hurry up,” he told her, his voice a harsh whisper. Adrienne had seen him somewhere before, knew he had something to do with the town, something official. He looked out at the road as if afraid someone was going to drive in and discover them.
“She’s in here,” he said, relief in his voice, “she’s all right.”
That was enough. Adrienne hurried inside. The man was closing the door as she turned around.
“She’s upstairs,” he told her, “Dancer’s gone.”
She was already heading for the stairway. For a split second Wellner thought of retrieving the rifle but decided to leave it in the living room where he’d left it.
By the time he got upstairs Adrienne was already leaning over her daughter on the bed, her hand stroking her hair. For a moment he stood transfixed, his arousal growing.
As quietly as he could he started to slide the drawer of the dresser open. His fingers had already closed on the knife handle when through the pounding of the rain he thought he heard something outside.
He looked quickly over at Adrienne—she was so intent on her daughter she’d heard nothing. He slipped the knife blade—first up the left hand sleeve of his jacket, then silently slid the drawer closed. Her head came up, her eyes following him as he passed the bed and looked out the window. When he craned his neck he could see the grille of Frank’s truck.
“It’s okay,” he told her over his shoulder, “it’s Frank.” He straightened up and headed downstairs.
It had been a pretty half-assed excuse for a search, and Frank had finally realized there was little point in continuing with it. He thought how much different it was to be on the outside looking in, with no resources to back him up. He’d simply ended up driving around town, expecting at any moment to be pulled over by one of his own officers and asked what the hell he was doing. He still had a department radio in the truck—that wouldn’t last long—but there was little in the way of activity on it, certainly not what he would have expected with a search like this one in progress. The relative silence seemed ominous.
In the end he’d resigned himself to do what Cunningham had wanted him to do in the first place—go home and wait it out. That was admitting defeat, and it was painful. On his way back he glanced idly into Dancer’s yard and saw another vehicle there, sitting beside Dancer’s. Dancer never had visitors, and Frank didn’t recognize the other van.
He had nothing better to do anyway. He pulled into the dirt driveway leading to Dancer’s house so he could get a closer look at it. It looked vaguely familiar but old panel vans were everywhere. He automatically thought of running the plate but then remembered he wasn’t in a position to be running anything. He was just getting out of the car when the front door of the house suddenly opened. Frank had his personal gun, a big Colt Python, up and level in his hand by the time he registered who it was. Terry Wellner’s eyes went almost comically wide at the sight of the gun, both his hands going up palms out and away from his body. Frank lowered the gun and started to say something but Wellner motioned for him to keep quiet. Frank held the revolver muzzle down along his thigh and walked along the path to the door. He waited until he got closer, kept his voice low.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Wellner looked back over his shoulder, then turned and waved in the direction of Dancer’s old truck. He kept his voice very low.
“She’s upstairs—she’s in pretty bad shape. Dancer went out the back.”
Frank gave him a quizzical look, then started for the back of the house. The door was actually off to the left side of the kitchen, not the back, and he wouldn’t have much of a look at the field and woods behind the house until he actually got outside. There was a window over the sink that at least would give him a vantage point, and he went there first, keeping low and to one side and then looking out. He couldn’t see any sign of Dancer, and he turned back to the side door. He glanced back toward the front entryway. Wellner must have gone back upstairs. Frank crouched at the side door and kept low, pulling the door inward, and then crept out on the porch.
Dancer was almost home. He’d been in the woods for hours, just walking, away from everything. Sometimes he just got tired of the way peo
ple treated him, and lately it had been much worse. He knew it had something to do with that time in the schoolyard, and that there’d been something in the paper about it. Now he didn’t even want to walk downtown any more. People looked at him even more strangely than usual, said things to each other in low voices, and gave him a wide berth or even crossed the street when they saw him. There was a meanness to it that hurt his feelings, and the only time he felt better was when he was by himself.
He’d started out for the old cabin near the beaver dam, but when the rain started he was still a long way away. He even thought of going back to his house, coming back another time, but he felt good when he was at the cabin. He remembered the times he and his uncle had gone out there to fish at the old beaver pond, not caring if they caught much or not. He was bigger than his uncle but he always felt...safe with him. Or maybe it was the other way around, that his uncle wasn’t afraid of him, just treated him like what he was. Family.
He had a funny feeling and stopped, straining to listen. He thought he could hear something, like men talking to each other, but when he stood very still he couldn’t hear anything. By now he was pretty close to the cabin but it was raining too hard for him to hear anything other than the sound of the rain itself.
The feeling hadn’t gone away, though, and it was raining even harder. Before he even knew he’d done it he’d turned around, started back toward the house.
What surprised him was that even after he turned back toward his house the feeling just kept getting stronger. He looked ahead through the trees and caught a glimpse of his house and yard. Normally the trees would have blocked his view, but the ferocity of the rain had pounded many of the leaves off the trees and left only skeletal branches. There seemed to be a couple of vehicles in his yard, his own old truck off to one side where he usually left it. He was too far away to make them out, but he knew that it couldn’t be good. Nobody ever came by his house, except for Frank, and the way the vehicles were sitting in the driveway he couldn’t be sure if one of them was Frank’s or not. He felt like turning around, just walking back the way he came, but then he saw someone come out on the porch—it looked like Frank but at this distance through the rain he wasn’t sure. Something about the way the person moved bothered him and Billy instinctively went flat on the ground.
The rain was sheeting across the field, coming into the woods at an angle, and Frank realized finding Dancer in that would take manpower. His cell phone was in the truck but Wellner would have called 911 already.
He holstered the Colt and went back inside. He thought of checking the rest of the downstairs but it looked like Wellner had already been there for a while. More important to check on the girl. He was heading toward the stairs when Wellner stepped out of the living room. At first Frank didn’t register what was happening—the look on Wellner’s face, the rifle in his hands—but even before his mind caught up to reality his reflexes already had, his right hand going for the handle of the Colt even as he sidestepped left and low, his left hand coming up to meet the gun in his right -
Even from upstairs the sound of the shot was deafening, followed by the heavy sound of a body hitting the floor. Adrienne had jumped when she heard it, but Emily didn’t react at all. Adrienne looked down at her daughter and realized what she had to do. She got up and managed to pull the window up and open. She went over beside her daughter and tried to slap her awake. Emily’s eyelids fluttered but that was all. Adrienne glanced fearfully toward the door, then grabbed Emily by the wrists and pulled even as she knelt down by the side of the bed. She ducked low, trying to get Emily’s midsection over her shoulder, but she couldn’t get the balance right, get enough leverage. She stopped, trying to control the pounding of her heart, and forced herself to wait, get her breath back before she tried again.
Wellner was standing over Stallings, deciding whether to risk another gunshot and finish him, when he heard heavy footsteps on the wooden porch at the side of the house. He turned in time to see Dancer’s massive frame filling the hallway. Dancer was frozen in place, uncomprehending. Wellner knew that the rifle was the wrong weapon for what he wanted and he kept his movements slow, deliberate, reaching down for Frank’s revolver, his hand closing on the checkered grip, index finger curling inside the trigger guard. He kept his eyes on Dancer, watched the comprehension dawn in his face, and everything accelerated. Dancer was moving now and Wellner just got the shot off in time, bringing the heavy revolver up and firing left handed, the sudden, unaccustomed jolt of the .357’s recoil nearly jerking the gun out of his grip. It didn’t matter—Dancer was too big and too close to miss and he went down, his legs folding under him before he crashed to the floor.
Wellner heard a noise upstairs. He glanced quickly at Stallings, then at Dancer. Their blood was everywhere, and neither man was moving. He wasn’t sure if Stallings had contacted anybody before he got out of the truck, but Wellner knew the cops could arrive at any time, could even be pulling in now. This was happening too fast.
When he got upstairs it was almost too late. Adrienne was leaning out the window. The bed was empty and there was no sign of her daughter. Wellner crossed the room in three strides. She had one leg over the sill when he hit her hard at the base of the neck with the butt of Dancer’s gun. Her head snapped back with the impact and then she collapsed onto the floor. Wellner stepped around her and looked out the window. Emily was lying crumpled on the ground, not moving. He looked down at the mother, thought of finishing her right now, decided to wait. Whatever he did to her would have to fit whatever he could set up downstairs.
Frank wasn’t in pain. He was trying to think, but his mind kept oscillating through random images that were going by too fast to identify. He tried to move his hand, take inventory. He heard noises from somewhere else and then saw movement—somebody big moving down the stairs and then outside. He wasn’t sure where outside was, or where he was now. His vision narrowed, softly defined edges fading inward to a small, flickering point. He felt like he was falling backwards from a great height.
Wellner didn’t want to kill the daughter outside. It would be better if he had a scenario, a tableau with her body somewhere between Dancer and Stallings. He took a long moment to look up and down the road, then at Stallings’ place across the field, to make sure nobody else was going to stumble in on him. No movement anywhere. Dancer’s rifle had an old leather sling and Wellner used it to free his hands, scooping up Emily and carrying her effortlessly into the house.
He stepped over Stallings’ body and carried Emily across to where Dancer was sprawled on the floor. He was about to just dump her there when he reconsidered, instead turning and gently depositing her on the floor at Dancer’s side. He felt in control again, took his time, and considered his options. He decided, finally, and stepped past Dancer toward the kitchen. It had to be from Dancer’s gun and it had to be close.
That’s what had happened, Wellner decided. Frank’s desperate shot at Dancer had come too late, or else Dancer had pulled the trigger as a reflex after he’d been hit. They could reconstruct it however they liked.
It would work. The worst Wellner could be accused of would be faulty judgment and good intentions. He’d been going by, seen the vehicles, gotten suspicious...and blundered into something he shouldn’t have been a part of, a public spirited citizen in over his head. Nothing he could have done.
Emily moaned again as he arranged her beside Dancer’s body. He straightened up and started to unsling the rifle before he caught his mistake and remembered she had to be upright at impact for all of it to work. The front of the house was tiny—all the bodies were within only a few feet of each other—and the impact of the bullet would blow most of her skull all over the wall. Dancer would tower over Emily but the barrel of the rifle would have to be angled to fit the confrontation—Dancer hanging onto Emily with one massive arm around her neck, Frank bursting in to stop him, the standoff—the only thing that would make it believable would be Dancer’s size, the length of his arms. No
body else could hold a rifle that length in one hand and pull the trigger while holding the muzzle against someone they had wrapped up in the other arm. Wellner jammed the revolver in his jacket pocket—he needed both arms free, and he hooked them under Emily’s armpits to pull her to her feet. Once he had her up he unslung the rifle, using his weight to pin her upright against the wall of the stairwell while he tugged awkwardly on the rifle’s bolt.
Frank flickered in and out of awareness, wanting to just let go and then fighting to expand the pinprick of light wider. Just as it was closing down again he caught the glittering, impossibly slow pinwheel of the shell casing as it left the breech of the Springfield. He could see Wellner struggling with the bolt of the gun while he tried to hold the girl upright, the butt of Frank’s revolver sticking out of his jacket pocket.
Wellner closed the rifle’s bolt and moved his body clear of the girl. He stretched out his left arm, using his outstretched fingertips to pin her against the wall. He could feel her start to slide down the wall and knew he couldn’t possibly support her weight that way, not long enough to hold the Springfield in his right hand and somehow fire it at enough of a distance to duplicate Dancer’s reach. He stepped closer to her and propped her up again, pulling her left arm up above her head and jamming her hand into the narrow gap between two of the wood spindles that supported the stairway railing. He hesitated, then stepped back. She sagged, her hand starting to slip back through the gap. He moved closer and took her body weight again. It would be a matter of timing. Jam her hand between the spindles, take a long step backward, and fire.
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