“No.” Clint’s order barked in Jake’s ear. He heard a scrape, movement, as if Clint was standing up. “If what you’re telling me is right”—the captain’s voice was needle sharp—“you do not want to go storming in there. She could be armed. You already know she might be unstable. Let me—let law enforcement handle it.”
“I can talk to her, get her to give Zoe back—then you guys can come in—”
“No, Jake, I’m warning you. Stay away from there—”
He didn’t hear the rest. He cut Clint off, and hopping into his truck, he tossed his phone onto the passenger seat and keyed the ignition. He didn’t have a plan or a thought in his mind, other than he wanted his daughter. He wanted Zoe back, and he was going to get her. Now.
24
Liz’s hands on her body. Phone clattering to the concrete, lost in the scuffle, her fruitless attempt to break away. Now something stung her on the upper part of her thigh.
Gilly brushed wildly at it. “What is that? What are you doing? What is wrong with you?”
Her questions went unanswered. Very quickly, the liquid warmth from what she recognized was the beginning of a drug-induced high radiated from the injection site. Her body began to loosen. In one final coherent moment her eyes found Liz’s and clung there, shocked and disbelieving. Now with a strength that belied her small stature, Liz pushed Gilly against the side of her SUV. Her arms were jerked behind her with enough force to almost pull them from her shoulder sockets, and she was handcuffed.
Handcuffed!
She felt the bite of metal bracelets tighten around her wrists.
Was she being arrested? Was Liz—this woman whom Gilly had begun to consider her friend—was she a cop? But that couldn’t be right. She’d just been talking to Captain Mackie . . .
Gilly was losing focus. The cool blue flame of deep lassitude lighting her veins was familiar and welcome in the way an old and much-loved enemy might be welcome. The monkey turned cartwheels. Miss Goody clapped her hands to her head in dismay. Not again.
But it wasn’t only the drug rush that was recognizable. This scenario, too, had a familiar vibe. The store in Houston, where Brian had been shot—by Warren Jester, she now knew—had been set back from the road, on a quiet corner. Brian had been the only customer, and theirs had been the only car until moments after Brian had entered the store. Gilly had watched another car pull in, only to leave as quickly as it had come, as if the driver knew a robbery had been in progress. The difference was that crime had happened under cover of night, and this was happening while they could still be easily seen—by a witness, a passerby, the store clerk.
Was he looking?
Gilly squinted in the direction of the small building. The man, the driver who had pulled in moments ago, who she could have sworn had come around the back of his SUV toward her, was now looking at her over the roof of his car. He seemed to be smirking at her as if he was enjoying himself. Was it Mark Riley, or had she been mistaken?
Gilly saw another face pressed against the store window from the inside. Was it the clerk?
Or was she imagining that, too?
Liz’s grip on Gilly’s elbow kept her upright. Something hard was jammed into the small of her back. Gun? Gilly didn’t know. Liz pressed against her, using her body to keep Gilly moving forward, strong-arming her. She couldn’t manage her steps; her legs felt rubbery; her feet wouldn’t mind. She had an urge to laugh.
Was this a joke?
“You’ll pay for this,” Gilly told Liz, sniggering. “Miss Two-shoes doesn’t like it.”
There was no response. Maybe she hadn’t spoken aloud? She tried again. “Hey!”
Nothing. A grunt. The two of them kept moving around the building’s corner, passing from sun to shade. Now Gilly was slammed face-first against the side of a different vehicle. Truck? Van? She flipped her head, one cheek to the other, trying to get a look. It was white, dirty white. She’d seen it . . . Warren Jester . . . had a white van . . .
“You move again, I’ll kill you.” Liz’s voice was low.
“Why’re you doing this? I thought we were friends.” Gilly worked her tongue, trying to form into words the mush of thoughts passing through her brain.
Something made of cloth—a pillowcase, maybe—dropped over Gilly’s head, sweet smelling, suffocating. It pissed her off, and she thrashed, side to side. An open palm struck her ear. She was stung a second time, her other thigh.
More drugs.
Again, she felt the warmth spread out from the injection site. Some kind of opiate, she thought. Vicodin? Oxy?
Yippee! crowed the monkey. He’d always wanted to try it. Shooting the dope. Muscling. Skin-popping.
She’d had offers, like at a party somebody was always willing to share their works, needles and such, but there was too much risk. She’d known a couple of people who’d died from abscesses they’d gotten at injection sites. Anyway, she hated needles. It had been easier, snorting or swallowing the stuff. But booze was her thing. She really loved to drink.
A door opened, a vehicle door, and Gilly was forced into what felt like a back seat, bench style, made to lie on her side. She drew up her knees, tried to mind the details. She had seen enough episodes of Dateline, watched enough Investigation Discovery TV, to know those victims who paid attention were the survivors, the ones who lived to tell. But her mind was full of fog as thick as curdled milk. She urged her eyes to stay open, but they kept drifting closed. Why fight it? asked the monkey. It’s not like you can see anything. When he laughed, he sounded like a hyena.
A high hyena, Gilly thought, like a fool. Her lips were numb, but she felt them curve into a smile. Don’t you know? You are in real trouble here, dumbass. The voice drifted.
Miss Two-shoes?
The monkey?
Did she care?
The vehicle—whatever it was, truck or van—took off, leaving the store parking lot, turning right, or at least that’s what Gilly thought. Within minutes, the driver accelerated, going even faster, and Gilly imagined they were at the point on the highway where the speed limit rose from fifty-five to sixty. Her eyes grew heavier, her mind drifted, humming with the sound of the tires, and she floated in a nether world, not quite sleeping, but not awake either.
She had no idea how much later it was when she felt the vehicle slow and then stop. The driver-side door slammed. The back door opened, and Gilly was hauled out. What did turn out to be a pillowcase was plucked from her head.
She blinked. In the clear, silvery light of early evening, it took several moments for her eyes to adjust, for her to make sense of her location, but when she did, her heart did a hop into her throat. They were standing behind a house built of limestone, the very one from her dream. There were no shutters on the windows back here, but the wood trim was the same faded green. The yard was overgrown. Junipers shouldered above a dark and seemingly impenetrable wall of vegetation. It encroached from every side as if to consume all in its path. Had Gilly had the will to make a run for it, even had she not been drugged, she doubted she would have gotten far.
“Home sweet home,” Liz said.
Gilly turned to look at her, and even in her altered state, she realized that Liz was different, changed in some way as if something inside her had come unhinged. Gilly was alarmed, but it was as if she were observing the scene from a distance, as if the fear belonged to someone else.
Keeping a grip on Gilly, Liz opened the passenger door of the truck, the same dirty white truck with the camper top from her dream, and brought out a gun, but it was the bit of blue ribbon—Zoe’s ribbon, looping the bracket that held the rearview mirror—that riveted Gilly’s attention. She stared at it.
Zoe was inside this house.
The dream had been right.
Her glance jerked to the back door. The urge to get inside, get to Zoe, was visceral, burning through her haze, but like her fear of Liz, Gilly felt separate from the sensation, as if she were viewing herself through glass.
Even that wa
s the same as her dream experience, though. During Wednesday night’s dream, Gilly had felt as if she were trapped behind a thick glass wall, and earlier today, while napping, she had watched this scene play out inside a snow globe, which had shattered to bits when it had slipped from her hands.
But suppose she was dreaming now?
The possibility that this wasn’t real bolted through her brain.
Gah!
Could she have set this up during lost time? Doped herself? Shot herself up with something, and now she was hallucinating? She swung her head to clear it, making her stomach roll. Bile rose in her throat, and she clenched her teeth, willing the sensation to pass, fighting to stay on her feet.
Liz’s grip on Gilly’s elbow tightened. The gun—it looked like Carl’s duty weapon that Gilly knew was a Glock—rose level with her face, muzzle glimmering in the fading sunlight. She looked down the tunnel of the dark bore and saw an image of herself from the past.
She is sitting in the car outside the corner market, waiting for Brian. Her palms are splayed over her belly, heavy with their baby girl. Gilly is singing softly, an old and silly children’s song her mother sang to her—Mairzy doats and dozey doats and liddle lamzy-divey—when she catches the movement from the corner of her eye. She looks out her window, the passenger side window, expectant, half smiling, but it isn’t Brian hovering outside the store’s doorway. The man is older and too tall, thin and rangy in a way Brian is not, and even though he is wearing a red ball cap, she is somehow aware that he’s terrified. She sees his hesitation, the wild swing of his gaze. Now their eyes lock, and they share an awful moment of desperation. His knowledge goes into her—that he has done something unspeakable, a thing that can’t now, or ever, be undone. Then he is coming toward her. She sees his face as plain as day, and it is Warren Jester’s face. Her eyes track his progress through the glass of the windshield as he dashes across her field of vision. It is when he has passed her that she sees the butt of the gun—a revolver of some kind—jutting from the waistband of his jeans.
Where had the memory been all this time? Gilly saw it so clearly in her mind’s eye now. The December night when Brian had been killed had been freezing, but the man had been coatless. She saw the hem of his red shirt, rucked up over the gun butt. It was a T-shirt. Short sleeved, red like his hat. The back was printed in white with the name Olajuwon and the number thirty-four. Hakeem Olajuwon, the Houston Rockets basketball player. She had known that. Brian had been a fan. But she had not remembered the hat, the shirt, or the gun on the night he was murdered. I don’t remember. It’s all a blur. That was how she’d answered Carl’s questions.
But here, now, was the memory—the image of Warren Jester’s face—as pristine as if it were new, dredged from some black hole in her mind. He was still wearing the cap, the same red ball cap.
“I know how to use this.” Liz waved the gun in front of Gilly’s face. “In case you were thinking of taking off.”
Looking past Liz’s shoulder, Gilly imagined it: running. What would it be like to be shot in the back? You wouldn’t know; you wouldn’t see it coming. She imagined staggering, falling, her life oozing from her. She’d be gone in a matter of minutes, less even, maybe seconds. She’d see Brian and Sophie. They’d be waiting for her. She was overcome with longing, an ache so deep it drew her forward. The jab of the gun muzzle against her chest stayed her.
“Trust me, you don’t want to try it.” The humor in Liz’s voice was bitter. “Woods out here go on forever, and they’re full of stuff you don’t want to tangle with. Rattlesnakes, for a start, wild hogs, coyotes. I heard even running across a bear or a mountain lion’s not an impossibility.”
“Zoe’s here, isn’t she, Liz. Why did you take her? Why have you brought me here? Are you working for someone?” Gilly saw again the black Navigator, parked at the Quick-Serv. The man, who might have been Mark Riley, staring at her. She caught Liz’s gaze. “You know him, don’t you? Mark Riley. He put you up to this.” But even as Gilly spoke, something told her it didn’t make sense. Why would he take Zoe?
Liz didn’t answer. She pushed Gilly up the back porch steps and cautioned her when she stumbled. “Careful. Wood’s rotten. Daddy was always promising Mama he’d pour her a set of concrete steps. But he never did.”
“You could let me have Zoe, and we’ll go. I promise we won’t tell anyone.”
Liz laughed at Gilly’s offer. “Get inside.” She ushered Gilly through a screen door and across a screened porch. Against the wall, in the shadows, an old, narrow iron bedstead was topped with a stained, ticking-striped mattress. A length of faded pink cane on the wicker rocker next to the bed was coming unspooled along one arm. The seat was broken clean through. Powdery layers of dust rose in swirls as they crossed the kitchen.
“Where is Zoe? Can I see her?”
No answer.
Gilly was prodded, gun muzzle jammed against the small of her back, across a living room, where sheet-draped furniture hulked like ghosts. An underscore of mildew mixed with the smell of ruination and abandonment. The silence was thick, the heat stifling. No wonder. All but one of the windows was boarded just as they had been in her dream. They entered a narrow hallway. Doors. Four in all. One at the end, two on Gilly’s left and another on the right. A couple of camp lanterns, sitting on the floor, gave off a murky glow.
“I need to lie down,” she said, and she wasn’t kidding. Her legs were trembling. Her mouth was dry, and her ears rang. She was sweat drenched. All side effects of whatever narcotic she’d been shot up with.
Liz paused outside one of the closed doors, and flinging it open, said, “Here you go. Ask and ye shall receive.”
Gilly balked, flinching from the heat, dank smell, and near impenetrable dark beyond the threshold. It was a moment before she saw that the single window in the room was boarded, too, from the inside. She made out the shape of a bed pushed against the opposite wall. Like the one on the screened porch, it was topped with a stained, ticking-striped mattress. The only other furniture was a straight-back chair.
“Go on.” Liz prodded her with the gun.
“No.” Gilly balked on the threshold. “You tell me what is going on. Why’re you doing this? Where is Zoe?”
Liz gave Gilly a shove and retreated, shutting the door.
Gilly heard her key the lock. “Can you at least take off these handcuffs?”
No answer.
“Water,” Gilly said. “Could I have some water?”
But if Liz heard her, she didn’t respond. Maybe Gilly hadn’t spoken aloud. It was hard to distinguish her real voice from the one in her head. Groping her way to the bed, she sat down, but the smell her weight displaced—a history of unwashed bodies and old urine, something danker, mold, mouse droppings, who knew—brought her upright, got her back on her feet. She crossed to the window, where the fast-fading light broke along one edge of the plywood covering. Putting her eye to the crack only blinded her further. She sat on the floor, brain floating in her skull. Her thoughts, barely formed, drifted.
Her physical awareness skittered from the hard surface under her butt to the metal chafing her wrists to her thirst. She needed a bathroom.
She didn’t know what amount of time passed. She might have dozed.
Eventually, she made herself get up and walk the room’s perimeter, feeling long the wall with her shoulder for the light switch, jubilant when she located one, but when she managed to flip it up, nothing happened.
She found the door and kicking it, yelled, “Let me out!” She shouted it again, “Let me out!” And she kept it up, kicking and shouting until she was footsore and hoarse. The door barely moved. It felt sturdy, as if it was solid rather than hollow. But the racket she’d made was enough to raise the dead, literally.
She heard it when she stopped. The sound of crying was more an exhausted whimper. It was the sound overly tired children made when they had long forgotten the reason for their unhappiness.
It raised the hair on Gilly’s ne
ck; it jolted her with fresh energy.
“Zoe!” Gilly shouted her name, paused to listen.
Silence.
“Zoe?” She tried again. “It’s Gilly from Cricket’s. Can you hear me?”
“Gilly?”
“Yes, honey.” Relief closed Gilly’s throat. “Are you okay?”
“Is my daddy here? I want to go home.”
“Oh, I wish he could—” Gilly paused. She didn’t know how to go on, what she could offer as reassurance. Zoe didn’t sound right. Her voice was thick, her words slurred. It might be exhaustion, her tears. But Gilly didn’t think it was only that. She had a bad feeling, a sick feeling. She could no longer believe this had anything to do with Mark Riley. This was all about Zoe. Had to be. Oh, if Liz had doped that little child—
A sound of footsteps approached, stopped some way down the hall. A lock was keyed, a door opened. Voices. Liz’s low, soothing. Zoe’s higher, rising now into a shriek that turned Gilly’s blood to ice. Moments passed before Zoe’s cries subsided, resuming a monotonous, heartbroken rhythm. Shortly after, Gilly’s own door was unlocked.
Liz’s silhouette hovered on the doorsill.
Gilly thought of rushing her. She imagined head butting Liz dead center, a move that could very well knock her down. But then what? Gilly’s hands, cuffed behind her back, were useless, and even if they were free, Liz had the gun.
She waved it vaguely in Gilly’s direction. “Sit down.”
“What did you give Zoe?”
“A little something to help her rest. We can all use that about now, I think,” Liz answered serenely. She crossed the room. In addition to the gun, Gilly saw she was carrying two camp lanterns like the ones she’d seen in the hall. Kneeling, she switched them on, and Gilly blinked at the sudden brightness.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.
Liz looked up at her, lips pursed, considering.
“Please.”
What Lies Below: A Novel Page 24