by Linda Ladd
“Well, you’re pretty damn lucky, too. Hell, you guys must be living right. Okay, what to do next? Let’s see.” Happy Pete moved back to Boyce Collins, but he was still talking to me. “Collins was one of my doctors in the beginning, too, the sap, told me he thought I was a genius, and I am, but he’s not. Look where he ended up. Marty wouldn’t go for anything unscrupulous with the patients, but not so with Boyce. He worked right alongside me for a long time and then stole my research for his book. Now he’s just another loose end, the pretentious creep.”
He said to Collins, “Go over there and shoot our old friend, Marty, in the head.”
Collins rose obediently, went to Marty, put the gun to his temple, and pulled the trigger. The deafening blam rocked the room, the smell of smoke and cordite acrid in my nose and mouth, as the bullet ripped through Martin Young’s head and splattered blood and brains all over the wall behind him. I gagged and vomit burned up my throat, but nobody else in the room even moved. I didn’t want to look at the blood and the gore and what was left of Martin Young. Oh, God, I was really gonna die. We were all gonna die.
“This is getting a bit tedious for you, I suspect, Detective Morgan. Okay, so be it, let’s just get this thing done. I think you’ve gotten the drift, here. Hey, Thomas, it’s your turn.”
He told Boyce Collins to sit down, and then he said, “Thomas, kill Collins over there with the meat cleaver.”
Thomas got up obediently, picked up the cleaver off the crate. I didn’t want to watch as he raised his arm high into the air and brought the cleaver down as hard as he could on top of Collins’s head. The blow cleaved the man’s skull from scalp to eyebrows, and Collins collapsed on his knees, then fell forward on the floor, blood gushing out of his head.
“Very good, Thomas. Just excellent, really.”
“Okay, time to go, Thomas. Kill the detective first, then the others. Like I said, you can have her head, if you want it, but cut that off last, after you kill the others.”
Thomas moved toward me, his handsome face devoid of emotion. Happy Pete knelt down beside me and put his fingers on my wrist. “Oh, boy, your pulse is just racing. Now you know what real fear is, don’t you? Okay, Thomas, do your stuff.”
This was it. I was going to die. Right here. Right now. The Grim Reaper had finally found me. Thomas was going to get me, after all, just like he’d always wanted. I watched him raise the cleaver again, high, and I shut my eyes as he brought it down hard. The scream was high and horrible, but it didn’t come from me. I opened my eyes, and saw Happy Pete, on his knees, shrieking with pain and holding the stump of his right arm where Thomas had brought the cleaver down through it with incredible force. Blood spurted everywhere, and the severed forearm and hand fell on the floor. I pushed my chair away from the horrible sight, trying to get away, as Thomas brought the cleaver down again but this time in a hard, sideways swipe that took off Happy Pete’s head at the neck. The head went bouncing and rolling across the floor, the gush of hot blood spraying all over me.
Panic-stricken, I fought desperately against the tape, but then Thomas was there beside me, as if nothing had happened, patting my blood-spattered cheek to console me, and I cringed away in utter horror. His face was right in front of me, and up close, he looked a lot different than he had when I’d last seen him; his hair was no longer blond and he had gained a lot of weight, mostly muscle mass. But it was him, oh, God, and he was completely insane and he had me helpless and captive again, just like he had last time. And I knew what he was going to do, what he had always wanted to do. He was going to take me to his hell on earth, wherever it was, and he was going to keep me captive there with him forever.
“Thomas, please,” I got out. “Don’t hurt me. Let me go.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, Annie, don’t you see, that’s why I had to kill Pete.” He was using the name he’d known me by when we were children. He went on, his face growing angry. “He thought he was so smart, that he could hypnotize me, of all people.” He laughed as if that idea were so ridiculous. He still had the cleaver in his hand, but it was lying in my lap now with his victims’ blood dripping off it. He was talking to me, very earnestly. “I’ve been studying psychiatry ever since I got put in that hospital. I know how things work, how the doctors think. It was ludicrous, all of it, to think Pete thought he could manipulate me. What a joke. I fooled better psychiatrists than him, and every one of them tried hypnotherapy on me. I knew how to pretend to be in a trance, but not these other people Pete’s been messing with.” I groaned in growing despair but he kept on talking like nothing had happened, as if corpses were not lying maimed and mutilated on the floor around us. “Tee did get me a key and helped me escape from the hospital, and that was nice of him. But none of that’s important, the only important thing is that we’re together again. How’s Harve doing, by the way?”
Last time he’d gotten me in his lair, I had managed to outwit him, but this time I couldn’t think straight enough to do anything but sit frozen with absolute, overwhelming, dehabilitating dread. If I did the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, I could die any minute in a terrible, horrible, gruesome way. Nobody could save me now.
“Come on, Annie, let’s get outta here. We have lots of plans to make, you know, like where we’re gonna live. I thought maybe Florida, Pensacola, maybe. You’ll like those snow-white beaches, or maybe Alabama. People down south are real friendly. And we’ve got to dig up my mother, too. God, I love you. It’s just been so long since I’ve seen you. Why didn’t you come visit me in the hospital? I watched out the window for you every single day.”
Sitting rigid, I watched him cut the tape off my legs with the bloodstained meat cleaver. Pete’s blood had saturated my clothes now and felt cold and clammy against my skin. Thomas cut the tape off my wrists, then taped them together and jerked me upright, as I fought the terrible vertigo and dizzy residue of the drug. Dragging me with him, he took me out the back of the warehouse where the others had parked their cars, leaving Roy and Khur-Vay sitting docilely in their chairs among the dead as if he’d forgotten all about them.
Then we were in Happy Pete’s spotless and fancy new white Avalanche truck, heading down the narrow road toward the blacktop, jouncing over ruts and recklessly mowing down bushes alongside the road. I tried to get the door open, but it was locked from the driver’s side, and I knew my only chance was to wait long enough to make him think I was too scared to move, then go for an escape.
Excited, Thomas was talking nonstop about how great it was to be back together and how we could collect shells on the beach together, and nearly overturned the vehicle with his reckless swerve out onto the blacktopped road. He floored it for the bridge, going way too fast, and as we roared across the narrow bridge, car lights lasered through the darkness as a vehicle rounded the curve by the Riverside Inn, the headlight glare hitting us directly in our faces.
When I recognized the vehicle as a Humvee, I knew it was Black. I had to make my move now. I started screaming and hitting Thomas with my bound hands, and struggled to get the can of mace out of my pocket, but he punched me hard in the head with his fist and knocked me back against the passenger’s window. Shoving the gearshift into reverse, he gunned the truck back over the bridge, weaving dangerously from side to side. Black brought the Humvee roaring straight at us with all the power of a military tank, and Thomas jerked the wheel at the other end of the bridge and slid the Avalanche into a sideways skid, trying to turn the truck around. Black was on us again, and Thomas floored the gas pedal and brought us ramming into the side of the Humvee. The impact was violent with shattering glass and rending metal, and the sheer force of the collision sent the Avalanche skidding and careening with screeching brakes over one end of the bridge, and we went crashing down the embankment, overturning on our side just above the water.
Thrown forcefully against the passenger’s window, the side of my head broke the glass as the truck teetered precariously back and forth for a second or two, then slowly tipp
ed over with a whine of crushed metal and broken glass, then rolled over and landed upside down in the river. The second impact sent my forehead hard against the windshield with an incredible burst of pain, and I blacked out until cold river water revived me. I couldn’t see the water pouring in, but I could hear it and feel it, cold and shocking and black. The headlights were still on, creating bright arrows of light under the water, and I could see Thomas struggling to get out the driver side window. I tried to do the same as the interior quickly filled up with the rushing current.
Weak, blood streaming down both sides of my head, I somehow held my breath in the submerged car and wrested myself free of the tangled wreckage and pushed myself out of the broken window. I floated upward and surfaced, gasping for air, pushed violently sideways in the swift, swirling current. I rolled onto my back and got a brief glimpse of stars in the black night sky, heard somebody yell my name, and then I gave up the fight. It was the end. My time had come. I sank into the dark water and let it take me down the river, slowly swallowing me into its ink-black, silent depths.
EPILOGUE
Springfield News Leader—Springfield, Missouri
MURDER, ATTEMPTED MURDER IN OZARK
OZARK, MISSOURI—The abduction and attempted murder of two women by an escaped mental patient left three prominent psychiatrists dead and a sheriff’s detective in critical condition. Ozark police officers arriving at the scene said the mental patient escaped and possibly drowned when his car plunged off a bridge on the Finley River.
A female victim, Sharon Richmond of Ozark, related to officers a terrifying ordeal that began when both she and Canton County Sheriff’s Detective Claire Morgan were taken captive with several other victims inside a deserted warehouse two miles upriver from the well-known Riverside Inn Restaurant in Ozark.
The three dead males identified at the scene were Dr. Boyce Collins, Dr. Martin Young, and Dr. Peter Parsons, all three well-respected psychiatrists at the Oak Haven Clinic in Jefferson City. According to a witness at the scene, the perpetrator, Thomas Landers, was attempting to abduct Morgan when their truck went into the river. Morgan suffered severe head injuries and is at the Cox Medical Center in Springfield where she remains comatose and in critical condition. Richmond and an unidentified teenager were also admitted for observation.
I wasn’t sure where I was. I wasn’t sure who I was. I didn’t care. It was all misty gray and cool and ephemeral, like drifting inside the loveliest, quietest cloud ever created. I was just floating around, softly, swaying gently, and I liked it. It was peaceful and calm, no noise, no bother, no fear. I realized that I was anchored to the ground, somewhere far, far below, at the other end of a shiny silver tether that slipped down through the clouds mounding like giant, fluffy cotton below me. That didn’t matter. I didn’t want to think about it. I just wanted to be very still and enjoy the soft rocking motions of the gentle breezes. I wanted the clouds to take me higher, up very high, up into the bright white light making the clouds glow above me. It beckoned to me but I couldn’t seem to make myself loosen the silver cord holding me in place so I could float up to that beautiful place.
I shut my eyes and knew nothing more until a man’s voice awoke me. It was deep and husky and sounded scared and insistent and determined. I didn’t like it, but the voice was familiar somehow, and somehow I knew I had to listen.
“Come on, baby, I know you can hear me. I know you can. You can come back, just try, try to open your eyes, try to follow my voice back.” Then the voice melted away and there was a strangled sound, and I saw a face materialize inside my mind, with blue eyes and black hair, but I didn’t really recognize it. I ignored it then and let the rocking lull me to sleep again.
The voice came often and made me weary of listening because I liked the quiet. And then other voices came, not as often as the blue-eyed face but enough to disrupt my peace and wake me up.
“It’s me, Claire, Bud, c’mon, please don’t do this to us. The doctors say you can recover, if you’ll just wake up. You’re in a coma, that’s the problem, you gotta wake up to get well. Charlie’s here, too. We’re all here.”
That voice didn’t even sound familiar. Neither did the ones that came after him. I slept again, wishing they would just leave me alone and give me the tranquillity I wanted. But they didn’t, they wouldn’t stop, and the voices seemed to go on night and day and forever.
“It’s Black, Claire, listen to me, listen, damn it, you can do this. Everybody’s been here to see you. It’s okay to wake up. I’ve got you back home now, and I’m not going anywhere until you open your eyes. You’ll be all right. It’s over. I’ve got the best doctors in the world on your case. You’re healing just fine. All you have to do is come back to me. You’ve got to come back. Just do it. Do it, Claire.”
I slept some more. The voice would not stop. Now it was reading to me. Shut up and go away, I thought. Leave me alone. That same face loomed in my mind, and he looked vaguely familiar now, but I still didn’t know him. I didn’t want to know him.
His voice seemed always to be there, always talking to me. “The sheriff needs you, Claire. You love being a detective, remember? You’re good at it. You’ve put lots of criminals behind bars. You got them, all of them. They’re all dead. They’re never going to kill anybody again. Charlie needs you back on the job. I need you back.”
Then a long time later, another voice came in to wake her, slow and drawling. “It’s Joe McKay, Claire. What you tryin’ to pull? Scarin’ us all to death like this. You get your pretty little butt back here. Lizzie’s here with me. She wants to say hi, too.”
The more I heard the voices, the closer they seemed. They were dragging me down through the lovely clouds, down to wherever the silver rope was anchored, and I didn’t want to go down there. I wanted them to stop, I wanted to stay here in the soft quiet so I resisted and tried to arrest the descent and shut my ears and not listen. Why wouldn’t they just leave me alone?
Then I heard the voice of a child, very indistinct and faraway. Nothing more than a whisper. “Me and Jules is sad you’re sick.”
A vision erupted inside me, a little blond boy with chubby cheeks and chubby arms and a fishing pole with a little perch hanging on the hook. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he needed me. I haven’t seen him in so long. I gotta go back and find him. I left him somewhere, but I don’t know where. I’ve got to find him. He’ll be scared without me, I know he will.
Somehow I raised myself from that lovely, dreamy, pearly white, peaceful bed and took hold of the silver rope. I began to pull myself down, hand over hand, down, down, listening for the little child’s voice until the other voices came closer and closer, and the one named Black who pestered me so relentlessly, said, “Oh, thank God, she’s coming to. She’s trying to wake up.”
Then finally, at long last, I opened my eyes.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2009 Linda King Ladd
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 0-7860-2334-1
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