No Safe House

by Linwood Barclay

  Wondering whether there might be a way I could move things along, I pressed the Glock harder against Wyatt’s temple, to the point he nearly lost his balance. I said to him, “She needs to decide just how much she loves, and needs, you.”

  “Give him the gun, for Christ’s sake!”

  From below, near total silence. I thought I heard a muttered “Fuck.” The tension probably didn’t last more than ten seconds, but it seemed to stretch out for much longer.

  It was a relief when I heard Vince say, “I’ve got it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “The two of you can come back down now. Wyatt, you first.”

  “He’s got a gun on him,” I said.

  “Wyatt, be a good boy and let Terry relieve you of that,” Vince said.

  “Use your left hand,” I said. I’d seen a movie or two.

  Wyatt forced his left shoulder up and took the gun from his waistband. Holding it between his thumb and index finger, he dangled it toward me and I took it with my left. Without looking, I dropped it behind me on some insulation.

  “I take it,” I said to Vince, “that I don’t have to bring all these guns down.”

  “Just the one in your hand.”

  Wyatt turned himself around and lowered his legs through the hatch, found a perch on the ladder, and descended. I grabbed my phone on the way to the opening, and by the time I was down, gun still in hand, Vince was stationed in a corner of the room with the gun trained on the happy couple, now standing shoulder to shoulder.

  “We tell where she is, right now, you let us go,” Reggie said, still an edge in her voice, still thinking she had some leverage.

  Vince looked at me and sighed. “Do I look like I have some sort of mental problem?”

  “It’s okay. We’ll take you,” Wyatt said. “We’ll take you to the house. We’ll take you to her.”

  “Who’s with her?”

  “Nobody,” the woman said. “She’s alone. Tied up, but just fine.”

  Vince’s eyes went from her to him and back again. He said, more to himself than anyone else in the room, “We only need one person to take us there.”

  I thought, Please don’t kill someone in my house.

  “Come on,” Reggie said, a hint of pleading in her voice. “We’re cooperating, we are.”

  “We’ll get her back to you,” Wyatt said flatly. “We’ll do what you want.”

  “We’re going back out to your car,” Vince said, “and you’re driving.” He was looking at Reggie. “I’ll be in the back with your husband.”

  Which put me up front, riding shotgun, as it were. Unless Vince no longer required my services.

  I decided to ask, “You still need me?”

  The man looked wounded. “Are you kidding? You’re my number two.”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  TERRY

  VINCE said I’d lead the pack and he’d take up the rear. So I went down the stairs first, followed by Wyatt, then Reggie. Vince, hobbling some, came down last. He and I maintained a solid grip on our weapons.

  Vince had taken Reggie’s car keys from her and had the presence of mind to ask Wyatt for his set, too, no doubt figuring that both of them would have keys to the BMW. He was right.

  Vince tossed Wyatt’s keys into the shrubs under the front window and held on to Reggie’s. When we all came out of the house, he hit the remote to unlock the BMW. “Go on and get in,” he said to the couple. “We’ll be right along.”

  Reggie got behind the wheel and Wyatt settled in behind her.

  I said to Vince, “You think they’re telling the truth? That Jane’s still okay?”

  Grim faced, he said, “Gotta hope.”

  “You could have told me about the guns being hidden up there instead of money.”

  “I knew you’d figure out what to do. If you’d known ahead of time, you’d have been too nervous.”

  Like I wasn’t already?

  “Vince,” I said, reaching out tentatively and resting my hand on his arm. He glanced at it and I took it away. “I wasn’t going to say this again, but damn it, you really could call the police now. You’ve got these two. You can hand them over.”

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said.

  “You have to,” Vince said, his voice sounding weak. “Because I can’t do it alone. If it’s just me, they’ll get the drop on me. I’m feeling like shit. Coming down the stairs there, things were spinning some.”

  I locked up the house while he limped to the car and got in the back next to Wyatt. Following his lead, I kept the gun down and close to my thigh so as not to attract the attention of anyone passing by. As I was getting into the front passenger seat, Vince was handing Reggie her car keys.

  Reggie took us north out of the neighborhood and got on 95 heading east, but very soon she took the Milford Parkway north to the Merritt, then went west. She got off at Main, went north, passing Sikorsky on the right, then hung a left on Warner Hill Road. We made a left onto Colbert, and soon she was rolling the BMW up the driveway of a nondescript white bungalow, tapping a button on a remote clipped to the visor. Ahead of us a garage door rolled up.

  Nobody had said a word the entire trip.

  “Take the keys,” Vince ordered me.

  Reggie removed them and handed them over. I tucked them into the pocket of my pants as I got out of the car.

  “Close the garage,” Vince said, and she hit the button to make the door rattle down behind us.

  In the garage, there was another door that led into the house.

  “This your house?” Vince asked.

  Wyatt nodded. “We live here.”

  I tried the door, but it was locked. “Which one is it?” I asked Reggie, holding her keys in front of her.

  She pointed. “That one.”

  I inserted it into the lock and turned. The door was unlocked, but before I could push it open, Vince said, “Wait.”

  “There’s no one else here,” Wyatt said. “There’s no other car.”

  “Go in first,” Vince told him, and Wyatt did as he was told. I went after him, then Reggie, and as always Vince was last.

  We’d come into a laundry room off the kitchen. Just ahead of us, a set of stairs led down.

  Vince shouted, “Jane!”

  “She can’t talk,” Wyatt said.

  His face went dark. “Where is she?”

  Reggie said, “Downstairs.”

  “Let’s go.”

  We went, in our regular formation, to the basement. We were in a wood-paneled rec room with a Ping-Pong table, a couple of old couches, and a big-screen TV on the wall. There was also a long desk set up with three laptops on it, and stacks of what looked like tax forms. For their IRS tax refund scam, I guessed.

  “In there,” Wyatt said, pointing to a door on the far side of the room. “It’s a bedroom.”

  “I’ll watch them,” I offered, training my Glock on the two while Vince crossed the room.

  He put his hand on the doorknob, held it there for a second, as if afraid to see what was on the other side. But then he gripped it and swung it wide.

  We all looked.

  At the empty chair, with lengths of rope scattered around it on the floor.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  WHEN Jane Scavullo heard the door open upstairs, sensed footsteps coming into the house, she wanted to be hopeful. Right away, she could tell by the sounds overhead that there was more than one person entering. Two, maybe more, pairs of footsteps. That in itself was neither good news nor bad. Yes, it could be Wyatt and Reggie returning. But it could also be Vince, with at least Bert and Gordie in tow.

  But her gut told her it was not going to be Vince, or Bert, or Gordie.

  Her instincts turned out to be partly right. It wasn’t Vince and his crew. But it wasn’t Wyatt and Reggie, either.

  That was confirmed as soon as she heard someone speak.

  “I’m gonna kill the little bitch.”

  The voice wa
sn’t quite the same as she remembered it, but she knew who it was.

  Joseph was back.

  Not exactly who she was expecting. Jane figured Joseph and Logan were out of the picture indefinitely while Joseph got patched up at the hospital. This was not a welcome development, particularly considering that there was no indication Reggie and Wyatt were here. Sure, maybe they were going to kill her anyway, but Jane believed Reggie might be quicker about it.

  She was not confident Joseph would be merciful.

  She heard running down the stairs. Then, seconds later, she sensed the door opening. A quick rush of air.

  Before a word was said, someone grabbed hold of the hood over her head and yanked it off. The lights in the room had been turned on, and it took Jane a few seconds of rapid blinking to become accustomed. She’d been in darkness for hours now.

  God, what a sight he was.

  There were splotches of dried blood on Joseph’s shirt, his neck, his cheeks. If he’d made any attempt to clean himself, he hadn’t done a very good job.

  Then there was the nose itself.

  Jane couldn’t see much of it, hidden as it was under a wallet-sized wad of gauze and white medical tape, much of it smeared with blood. Jane wondered whether the emergency room doctor had been blind. This was the worst example of first aid she’d ever seen.

  “I’m gonna enjoy this,” Joseph said, standing a foot away, waving a finger in her face. He sounded as though he had the world’s worst head cold.

  Logan appeared at the door, stepped in, and placed his hands on his brother’s shoulders, pulled him away.

  “Just hold on, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “You’re a goddamn fool, you know that? A goddamn fool.”

  “I’m gonna do her,” he told him.

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that. It’s all you’ve said the last two hours. What the hell were you thinking, walking out of the ER? Another ten minutes and someone would’ve looked after you.”

  “I took care of it,” Joseph said.

  “Oh yeah, right.” Logan looked at Jane. “You see what he did? Bought some bandages and shit and tried to patch himself up because he couldn’t wait to get back here and take care of you. Damn, why’d you have to go and do that to him?”

  “Get out of my way,” Joseph said, although it sounded more like, Geb ou da my may.

  He lunged at Jane, went to put his hands around her neck. He got his hands on her for half a second before his brother ripped him away.

  “Listen to me!” Logan shook his head in exasperation. “I get why you want to do this. If it was me, I’d want to kill the bitch, too. But you can’t! Okay? You just can’t. We don’t know if the time’s right.”

  “Let go.” Leb doh.

  “Listen! They’re not back yet. Until they’re back, we don’t know if everything’s gone down okay.”

  “It’s been too long.”

  “Not that long. Maybe they ran into a complication. Maybe Fleming was late, had trouble rounding up the money. But here’s the thing. They might still need her. Like, maybe the guy says he’s got the money but he gets a bug up his ass about being able to talk to her on the phone before he hands it over or says where it is. Something like that. So what happens if they phone wanting us to put her on and you’ve already gone and wrung her neck? You want to fuck that up? You want us to lose out on the money? We’re this close, Joseph. We’re this close.”

  “She broke my nose,” he said.

  “I know, I know—I understand. I’m sure, when the time comes, Reggie’ll be okay with letting you do it. But you can’t do it now.”

  “Call them,” Joseph said.

  “What?”

  “Call them and see if they’ve got the money. If they’ve got the money, I can do it now.”

  “I’m not going to call them,” Logan said. “We wait to hear from them.”

  “What if something went wrong?” Joseph asked. “What if the cops got involved? What if they got picked up? Maybe the cops are on the way here. That’s why we need to take charge. We need to do her now, because she needs to pay for what she did to me, and because we don’t want her talking to nobody about what she knows.”

  Jane made desperate noises behind the tape. She wanted to make some kind of deal. Tell them something that might get them to change their minds.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Joseph snapped at her.

  Logan was thinking. That last part Joseph said, about the possibility that something had gone wrong, was worrying him.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we could do.”

  “What?”

  “Well, we were never going to kill her here. We talked about taking her out in the woods, doing it there. We could start heading out that way. Get her out of here, put her in the back of the Lexus, make the drive. Sooner or later they’ll call and say it’s done, and we can finish her. And in the meantime, if they need her to say something on the phone, we’ve still got her.”

  Joseph’s entire body seemed electrified, like someone who’d had far too much caffeine. He was so itching to do this.

  “When you said ‘we finish her,’ you mean me, right? I get to do her. I’m the one who gets to do her.”

  Logan smiled, nodded slowly, tried to calm him down. “You’re the man, Joseph. You’re the man. Let’s get her out of this chair.”

  Joseph managed a tortured smile under all the gauze and blood. “You’re a good brother, Logan. You really are. I don’t tell you enough.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  TERRY

  “YOU happy?” Reggie asked. “She got away. So we’re good.”

  Vince stepped into the downstairs bedroom to examine the empty chair and the bits of rope while I stood, gun in hand, in the rec room, watching Reggie and Wyatt.

  “There’s blood,” Vince said.

  “That’s from Joseph,” Wyatt said. “He was gushing it. Your girl broke his fucking nose when she head-butted him.”

  Vince came out of the room, looked over at the table supporting the computers and tax files. A landline phone was sitting on it. Vince walked over, picked up the handset, put it to his ear, then hung it back up.

  “Dial tone,” he said.

  “So?” Reggie said.

  I knew what he was getting at. “Jane would have called,” I said.

  Vince glanced my way. “Yeah. If she’d got loose, she’d have called my cell, let me know.”

  “Maybe not,” Reggie argued. “More likely, she was scared, wanted to get out of here as fast as she could. She didn’t want to take the time to do it.”

  Vince raised his arm, aimed the gun at Reggie’s head. “Bullshit. You’ve got five seconds to find out where she’s gone.”

  She didn’t blink. “How the fuck am I supposed to know? When I left, she was here.”

  “Four seconds.”

  “You remind me of my father,” she said coldly. “May he continue to burn in hell.”

  “Three seconds.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Wyatt shouted. “It has to be Logan and Joseph.”

  Reggie looked at him. “They went to the hospital.”

  Wyatt looked at Vince. “I’ll call him. I’ll find out. Just put the fucking gun down.”

  “Before you call,” Vince said, “here’s what you’re going to say.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Say there’s been a hitch. Tell them I’m ready to hand over the money, but not until I see Jane. Not talk to her on the phone. See her.”

  “I don’t even—I don’t even know for sure they’ve got her,” he protested.

  “I’m going to shoot your wife in the head,” Vince said.

  I had no doubt. He’d been hanging on by his fingernails for too long. Part of me wondered whether Vince just wanted to kill somebody. Didn’t matter who.

  “Wait wait wait,” Wyatt said. He reached for the landline phone, entered a number.

  “It’s ringing,” he said. “It’s still ringing. Just stop pointing that gun at my—Logan! Logan,
is that you? Where—? No, I don’t have the money yet but we almost—Just shut up for a second! Where are you? We just got back to the house and the girl’s gone . . . Why did you do that . . . ? He didn’t go to the hospital? Is he a total idiot? Yeah, okay, we agree, he is . . . You have to bring her back . . . He can’t do that! Are you hearing me? I know he’s pissed, but you can’t let him do that. We don’t get the money until he sees the girl . . . Yeah, okay, we’ll talk about that after.”

  Vince whispered to Reggie, “Get on the phone and tell them to get back. I get the feeling you’re the one everyone takes orders from.”

  She glared at him, then took the receiver from her husband and said sharply, “Logan! You and your brother better be back here in five minutes with that girl or your share is fuck all! You got that? Nothing! You get nothing. Not fifty percent, not twenty-five, not ten. Nothing.” She waited while this sunk in with Logan. Reggie put her other hand over the phone and said to Vince, “He’s talking to his brother. He just has to—Yeah, I’m here.”

  Back on with Logan. “The plan? Get your ass back here with her. By then we’ll have worked out how we’re going to show her off. Maybe a video thing with my phone. Don’t you worry about that.” She listened for another second, then lowered her arm. The call was over.

  “He’ll do it,” she said to the rest of us.

  Vince asked, “Where are they now?”

  “About ten miles north. They were heading up toward Naugatuck, the state forest.”

  “They were going to execute her in the woods,” Vince said.

  Reggie’s eyes had gone dead. “Yeah.” She swallowed. “But we stopped that. They did that without my say-so. That was not supposed to happen.”

  “Not this soon, you mean.”

  She had no comment. Maybe she knew lying was pointless now.

  I’d been feeling uneasy since Grace’s call to me the night before, and could barely get my head around all the things that had happened since. But right now, at this moment, even though Vince and I had the upper hand, I felt myself in a darker place than any I’d been in up to now.