by H. P. Bayne
“Well, there’s Paul for starters,” Sully said. “He was gay.”
Zane angled his face slightly toward Sully for a moment but otherwise kept going. “What the hell are you talking about? He was always hanging around women.”
“Maybe he just liked hanging out with them,” Sully said.
“Or maybe he swings both ways,” Zane said. “Look, I’m telling you Sparrow’s here somewhere. I just need to find her.”
Sully couldn’t fully disagree, not with Breanna standing at the end of the hallway, dead stare fixed on them as they approached. When Sully made eye contact, she lifted her arm and pointed left.
“Right or left?” Zane asked, and Sully—his focus having been entirely on Breanna—noticed they’d come to a T-intersection in the hall.
“Left,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I have a feeling,” Sully said.
Zane wasn’t sold, and Sully wasn’t about to reveal the reason for his own certainty.
“Look, you go left and I’ll take the right,” Zane said. “We’ll cover more ground that way.”
He didn’t wait for a response before swinging the beam of his flashlight around and taking off in the direction it now pointed, leaving Sully and Bulldog with the other path.
Bulldog had been largely quiet but he chose that moment to speak up, the tremor in his voice sounding like it was caused by more than just the cold. “Uh, Sully? Wasn’t Paul’s body floating down at the other end of the hall when we came out of the room a minute ago?”
Sully spun, the pull of the water nearly throwing him off-balance. He put out a hand, catching himself against the wall as he trained the flashlight on the spot where he’d found the floating corpse.
Paul was gone.
18
Sully’s first thought was to figure out where Paul had disappeared to.
While the currents outside were intense, it was too calm where they were for a body to have simply drifted away.
Sully took a step toward the area where he’d last seen Paul, but was stopped by a hand on his arm.
“Sully, no,” Bulldog said. “There’s no time.”
Bulldog had a point. The water, previously at the level of his waist, was now closer to the base of Sully’s ribcage. All the effort put into the planning and construction of this house was not enough to protect it from the forces of nature, and the Kimotan was proving to be an intruder the Dunmores hadn’t considered.
Sully was six feet tall, Bulldog just a few inches shorter. And Sparrow, by all accounts, was tiny enough to make both of them resemble grizzlies in comparison. If the water was reaching uncomfortable heights for Sully, he didn’t want to consider what that meant for her if she was trapped down here somewhere.
Breanna had moved further down the hall to the left and was waiting on them, so Sully gave up on Paul and headed in the direction the ghost was laying out for him. Now that they were all in one location, Sully was hopeful Breanna would be able to take them where they needed to go.
She was standing in front of a door at the end of the hall, a solid piece of steel given the appearance of regular hardwood but for the industrial handle. Sully tried it, but found it locked.
“Is there a key?” he asked Breanna.
Bulldog’s voice was shaking with cold as he answered. “Is Bree here?”
“Yeah. She’s showing me this is the door, but we can’t get through it.”
“Maybe Paul’s got it.”
The water splashed around Sully’s torso as he jumped at the sound of a voice from their left. “Paul’s got it, all right.”
Sully met the approaching glow of a flashlight with his own beam, illuminating a figure coming toward them. If Bulldog wasn’t also staring right at the image of Paul Dunsmore, Sully would have thought he was seeing another ghost.
“What the hell?” Bulldog said. “We thought you were dead.”
Paul moved past them, fumbling with a set of keys until he found one that fit a small box to the side of the door. “In my spare time, I act with the Kimotan Rapids Stratford Society—and, yes, I’m well aware of the stereotype of gay men and theatre. Last year, I played the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I learned how to play dead.”
Behind the box was a PIN pad, and the door beeped open after Paul keyed in four digits.
A short hallway beyond, revealed once they heaved open the door, was flooded torso-deep with water.
“Oh, sweet Jesus, no,” Paul moaned. “It’s supposed to be airtight in here. There’s oxygen pumped in, of course. It’s the outer chamber of a panic room.”
“Is Sparrow in there?” Sully asked.
Paul nodded. “Behind the door ahead. The main room is behind it.”
He started slogging toward the door which, unfortunately for him, left him ill-prepared for an attack by Bulldog even Sully didn’t see coming. Bulldog took as large a leap as the water would allow, throwing himself at the other man’s back and taking the pair of them beneath the surface.
Sully played the flashlight’s beam along the water, searching for a sign of the submerged men. At least one of them would have to come up eventually and, seconds later, it was Bulldog whose head and shoulders reappeared. One meaty hand followed, fingers bunched up in Paul’s sweater and dragging him forward to meet the force of Bulldog’s opposite fist.
Bulldog punched Paul twice in the face, his hold on his clothing all that prevented the man from falling back into the water. The shorter man was winding up for another punch when he appeared to change his mind, hand stilling mid-air before joining the other in the soaked folds of Paul’s sweater.
Bulldog forced a stunned Paul beneath the water’s surface, the tension on Bulldog’s face and the flailing of the other man’s arms providing all the evidence Sully needed as to what his friend intended.
Sully pushed forward until he could lay a restraining grip on Bulldog’s arms—or as much as he could manage with the flashlight still clutched in one hand.
“Let him go, Bulldog! Don’t do this!”
Sully’s position had the beam of the light shining directly up into Bulldog’s face, and it revealed a mask of rage. There would be no reasoning with the man.
Paul was still struggling, but he was weakening.
Sully didn’t give a damn about Paul, but he did care about Bulldog. The man had lived a hard life but, as far as Sully knew, he’d never killed anyone. If they got out of this in one piece, the last thing Sully wanted for his friend was life imprisonment in a six-by-eight cell.
He did the only thing he could think; he delivered as solid a punch as he could manage with frozen fingers to the side of Bulldog’s face.
The blow had the desired effect—to a point. Bulldog released Paul. Then he came at Sully.
Sully felt his back collide with a nearby wall and Bulldog’s knuckles pressing into his chest as he held him there.
“Bulldog—”
“Don’t you fucking protect him! He doesn’t deserve it!”
“I’m not trying to protect him. I’m trying to protect you.”
“I don’t need it. Sparrow needs it! My sister needed it!”
“Your sister?”
“He killed her! He killed Bree!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” The voice had Bulldog turning his head to where the dull ambient light from the flashlight revealed an exhausted Paul standing, slightly hunched, in the water as he regarded them. The question had been spoken through heaving breaths and now he broke off into a round of watery coughs.
Bulldog’s voice was a growl. “I’ll finish you, you sick bastard.”
“Bulldog, no!” Sully grabbed at his friend’s shirt in a weak effort to keep him from returning to Paul. Breanna was back, had positioned herself in front of Paul, dead stare focused on her brother.
“Give me one reason.”
Sully answered quietly, hoping Paul wouldn’t hear above his continued coughing. “Breanna doesn’t want it. She’s standing betwe
en you and Paul. You’ll have to go through her to get to him.”
Bulldog stilled and, in the seconds that passed, Paul regained control of his breathing, enabling him to answer the accusation. “I didn’t kill Bree. She was my friend. I cared about her.”
“So if it wasn’t you, who did it?”
“I thought it was Danny. But, now—” The sound of sloshing water from the door to the panic room’s outer chamber redirected his attention. “—I think you’re better off asking him.”
Sully had trained the light on the doorway in the same moment, allowing them to spot Zane Mazur standing there, arms extended, his own flashlight bathing the small room in additional light. The gun, previously in the waistband of his pants, was now in his hand.
“You’re a slippery one, Paulie. I really thought I’d killed you. Didn’t see the bullet wounds, but the way you flew back when I fired, the way your face looked …. Wow.”
Bulldog looked back and forth between Zane and Paul. “What the hell is going on here?”
Paul squinted into the light from Zane’s flashlight. “What do you say, man? Want to enlighten everyone?”
“Fuck you, Paul.”
Paul wasn’t giving up that easily. “Honestly, until you showed up tonight, I thought Echoles killed Gabby and that Bree was murdered by her husband. But it was all actually you. I knew you were gaga for Gabby and were pissed she was into the professor instead. But why Bree? And why are you after Sparrow?”
“Gabby?” Sully asked. “You mean Gabriella Aguado?”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “You saw my tattoo. Zane’s got one just like it. So did Gabby and the prof.”
“Was anyone not in this coven?” Bulldog asked. Then, “We’re wasting time here. We need to get to Sparrow.”
“She’s safer where she is, right now,” Paul said. “So how about it, Zane? What’s the story? Gabby didn’t shower you with adoration, so you took her out?”
“Echoles changed her, and I hated she was letting him. She was this wild thing and he was trying to tame her, to mold her into something resembling the dead wife he never got over. She resisted him for a while, but she was starting to change. She wasn’t interested in the same things anymore.”
“The drugs, you mean,” Paul said. “A lot of us weren’t into that garbage you were peddling for Ken Barwell.”
“She was,” Zane said. “Or at least she used to be. We’d trip for hours, the two of us. We’d sit up all night together, giggling like kids or just staring into each other’s eyes and reading each other’s thoughts. I spent my whole life looking for someone I could trust. She was the closest thing I ever found to family. You know what that’s like, to have the only family you’ve ever known pulled away from you?”
A growl sounded low in Bulldog’s throat, but he didn’t charge, his gaze shifting between the two men in front of him. Bulldog, Sully realized, knew exactly what it was to have your only family taken; the only thing saving Breanna’s killer from facing his wrath was the fact he was trying to figure out which of them it was.
For Sully’s part, he could now see the answer. It was there, in the way Breanna was now circling Zane, staring as if seeing him for the first time as he truly was. She hadn’t seen his face the night she died, but she recognized the darkness inside him.
“I’m sure you’re aware I was caught breaking into the professor’s house,” Zane continued. “I got up to his altar, figured I’d do him in with his own athame. But that bastard’s tougher than he looks, put up a good fight. So I ran. Police caught up with me not far from there, knife still in my hand.”
The break-in at Marc Echoles’s house. Sully had never looked to see who had been behind it, figured it was more or less just some stupid drunk prank. He was kicking himself for that now.
Zane wasn’t done, but the spite left his voice momentarily as he spoke about the woman he’d professed to love. “I broke in there right after what happened with Gabby. I blamed him for it, wanted him to pay.”
“You mean after you killed her,” Sully said.
“I didn’t kill her. She got high and jumped.”
“She wasn’t using anymore. You drugged her, you got her to that bridge and you made sure she stepped over that railing. Then you choked her until she pulled her hands from the railing so when you let go, she had nothing to hold onto. She didn’t jump. She fell. And the only reason she fell was because you made it happen. You murdered her, Zane.”
Zane’s face, in the glow of Sully’s flashlight, slackened. “How the hell do you know that?”
“And all this time I thought it was Marc,” Paul said. “He was so angry after it happened, refused to talk about her. He was so sure he’d turned her around, that she was done with the drugs and that wild life. He seemed really let down when we all heard she jumped off a bridge with a system full of acid—so let down by her being back on the drugs that I figured he might have even been pissed off enough to have killed her.”
“Echoles doesn’t have it in him to do something like that,” Zane said. “He’s too fucking soft to do what needs to be done.”
“And Bree?” Paul asked. “Something needed doing there too, huh? I mean, I knew she didn’t like you, that she was suspicious about your intentions with Sparrow. She’d started to think of Sparrow as a daughter, begged me to look after the girl, to make sure she was protected. Figured I had the money and the connections to help her disappear. God help me, I didn’t believe Bree about just how evil you were. I knew things weren’t so great between her and Danny, that he was struggling to stay sober, and I started to wonder whether she might be too. But she wasn’t. She was a hell of a lot more on the ball than I was, and I can’t help thinking she’d still be here if I’d just listened. Because Danny didn’t kill her, did he? You did.”
“She always had to stick her nose into other people’s business.”
Bulldog’s anger found its target. “That’s what she did to help people, you asshole. She made other people’s problems her own.”
“She did it one too many times.”
Bulldog’s snarl became a roar, and it was only Sully’s shove—nearly sending the shorter man backwards into the water—that kept him from charging Zane and the gun he had levelled in their direction.
“She was his sister,” Sully explained, hoping that might be enough to prevent Zane’s shooting Bulldog now that he’d regained his balance.
“I’m sorry about that. You can believe me or not. I don’t care. But she didn’t leave me any choice.”
“You’d better fucking explain that to me, you bastard! You owe me at least that much!”
Zane, it seemed, couldn’t argue that point. “It started with Ken Barwell. I knew him through the Black Candle, and he offered to set me up in business to help me get through university. I love The Hub; it’s like home. But the pay is shit. So I started selling for Barwell, and I was turning a good profit. Only I discovered pretty quick what kind of scum he was when he attacked Abby, one of the girls I was looking after. I decided I was going to screw him over, hit him where it hurt. Figured if I played my cards right, I’d get him out of the picture and get my hands on his stock.”
“The drugs?” Paul asked.
“And the guns. There’s a good market for them. Barwell gets his supply—drugs and guns—from a major player out west, and Ken regularly owes the guy huge stacks of cash. I figured if I got ahold of his stash, it was only a matter of time before his supplier came at him for money Ken couldn’t get his hands on. In the drug world, that means you end up stuffed in a trunk and taken somewhere for a conversation with a baseball bat or a shotgun. Only I couldn’t get close enough.”
Sully thought back to that tense conversation with Ken Barwell as Bulldog provided the conclusion. “Sparrow ripped him off for you.”
“He wanted at her in the worst way afterward,” Zane said. “She knew it and she was scared. I told her I’d protect her, but she went to Bree instead. She told her all about the rip-off and the fact Barw
ell was out to get her.”
“And Bree came to me asking for the money to pay off Ken,” Paul said. “She told me what Sparrow did, and asked me to act as a go-between. I reluctantly agreed and did what I could to smooth things over. Ken agreed to let Sparrow go once the money was paid, but he wanted another condition met. He wanted the name of the man who sent Sparrow to rip him off. And Bree knew, didn’t she? She figured out it was you.”
“She was going to rat me out to Barwell. I had no choice. I had to keep her from telling. Do you have any idea what Barwell would have done to me had he found out?”
Sully put an arm out in front of Bulldog to act as a restraint. If Bulldog so chose, he could shove right past but he stayed where he was, allowing the exchange to continue between the two coven members. Because, come right down to it, that conversation was all that was keeping that door open and preventing Zane from adding to his kill list.
“You’re not only a coward, Mazur, you’re an idiot too,” Paul said. “Bree and I had a big blowup right before she was killed over whether or not to provide your name to Barwell. But I’m the one who wanted to identify you. She wouldn’t hear of it. Bree said she couldn’t live with having your blood on her hands when Barwell came for you. She asked me to look after Sparrow instead, to help her disappear from both Barwell and from you. I never thought in a million years you were capable of murder. I knew Danny Newton’s history so, when Bree turned up dead, I just figured it was a domestic homicide like they were saying. Had I known how right Bree was about what kind of scumbag you were, I would have figured out a way to hide her from you, too.”
“I didn’t want to kill her, and I honestly didn’t think I could go through with it,” Zane said. “I was watching her that night, trying to figure out a plan when I saw her husband smacking her around inside the house. She was a mess when she left, and I followed her for a minute or two until I figured no one was around to see. Then I gave her a good crack on the head. I got her back to my car, tied her up and took her to one of those empty Riverview houses.
“I didn’t think I could finish it. With Gabby, it happened so fast. She just basically slipped through my fingers and was gone. With Breanna, it was going to have to be deliberate. I had to psyche myself up to it. She started to wake up, though, and I don’t know why, but the thought of her looking at me, seeing me doing it, it freaked me out. So I just did it as quick as I could. I meant to take her back home after, dump her next to her drunk husband for the cops to find, but in the end, I just left her there.”