The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  “Don’t move, and don’t say a word,” he barked. “If you talk, if you scream, this all ends right now.”

  The warning made her lie still.

  He thought, One way or another, this all ends right now.

  Rudy spun the wheel, and the Saab squealed away.

  “Tabby!” Frost shouted into the phone.

  Her voice cut off as she began to speak, and all he heard was the pound of the rain, a car door slamming, and the overlapping wail of distant sirens. He shouted her name again, but when she didn’t answer, he threw his phone against the passenger door and drove even faster. He had never driven faster in his life.

  The Suburban rocketed north down the long hill toward the marina. The street was narrow, crowded with parked cars. His siren carried him through the intersections, which were mostly deserted in the early hours of Sunday morning. Rain poured across the truck. His windshield wipers jerked back and forth in a futile attempt to keep the glass clear, and he had to lean forward to see the road. Even as morning broke, the bay was invisible. Duane’s condo was half a mile away.

  Ahead of him, he saw headlights coming the opposite way, racing up the hill. The two vehicles were only two blocks apart when the southbound car made a sharp left turn, ignoring the stoplight. In the flash of his headlights, Frost saw a shine of red, and he had a quick mental image of Tabby outside Duane’s apartment building, about to get into a red Saab. He hit the brakes hard and turned right. He followed a parallel course one block south, flooring the accelerator, trying to get a jump on the car on the other street. He made a wide, screeching left and reached the intersection at Lombard at almost the same moment as the car he was chasing. It was a red Saab. And he glimpsed the face of the driver through the rain.

  Rudy Cutter.

  Just for a moment, he also saw a woman rear up in the passenger seat before Cutter pushed her down. The woman had a swirl of red hair. It was Tabby, and she was alive.

  The Saab spun away, its right-side wheels jerking off the ground before dropping heavily back down. The car jolted north toward the bay, kicking up spray like a fountain. Frost followed on his bumper. The street was wider here, and they had to swerve to avoid the early morning buses. Apartment buildings lined both sides of the street. Block by block, the bay got closer.

  He radioed in a call for backup.

  Seconds later, both vehicles screamed through the last intersection at Marina Boulevard, where the road ended at the water. They were on a flat, open stretch of road bordered by the marina’s green park, with the Golden Gate Bridge and the East Bay hills coming into view under the low clouds. Cutter sped right, and Frost brought up the Suburban immediately next to him. They raced side by side as the street curved eastward, and he could see bouncing white and red lights as cars ahead and behind them spilled to the curb to get out of their way.

  The red-roofed piers of Fort Mason loomed on their left. As they neared the intersection at Buchanan, two more squad cars converged from the south and east, and together, they forced Cutter off the boulevard into an empty parking lot leading to the old fort. Frost lost a few seconds as the Suburban lurched into a clumsy turn. The water was on his left. Dozens of boats bobbed like toys in the fierce wind.

  Cutter had a hundred-yard lead as he steered the Saab past the gatehouse at the fort’s entrance, but he was running out of pavement. Beyond the barracks and piers, the road dead-ended at the bay. As Frost wheeled past the gatehouse himself, with the two police cars close behind him, he spotted the Saab disappearing between the fort’s last dormitory building and a steep hillside lined with cypress trees. He pointed the Suburban across the empty parking lot and headed the same way.

  As he passed the last of the fort’s white brick buildings, he reached the final stretch of road at the water. Old railroad tracks ran across the pavement. A high retaining wall rose immediately to his right. Ahead of him, a long pier jutted into the bay. Where concrete pylons marked the end of the road, he saw the red Saab, its engine still running, its two front doors wide open.

  The car was empty. Cutter was gone. So was Tabby.

  46

  The rain swept like gunfire over the bay.

  The wind made it hard to stand as Frost got out of the Suburban with his pistol in his hand. Two police cars pulled up behind him. The long, painted wall of a renovated pavilion, lined with dumpsters, stretched out over the water. On his right, the fort’s old firehouse building blocked his view of the path beside the bay.

  Frost gestured for one of the cops to follow the pier. He led the way with the other cop to the trail overlooking the green water. He could see the island and the prison buildings of Alcatraz a mile and a half away across the white-capped surface of the bay. Gulls lined the rusted fence along the water and hunkered down against the storm. The paved trail led behind the firehouse and then ended at the steep, forested parkland that hugged the shore.

  He didn’t see Cutter or Tabby, but he heard a woman’s voice from somewhere inside the trees.

  One word. His name.

  “Frost!”

  He bolted along the waterfront. The other cop was at least ten years older than he was, and Frost easily outdistanced him. He pushed through a gap in the fence where the trail ended and found himself among dense trees. The damp ground fell away to the rocks at the water and climbed the hillside on a slippery bed of mud and pine needles. There was nowhere to go but up, and he could hear them above him, already near the top of the slope. He shoved his gun back in his holster and assaulted the hill. The wet earth fought him, and he struggled upward for nearly thirty feet until the cliff finally leveled off at a wide, paved bicycle path. From up here, the bay spread out like a postcard, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.

  Two sets of muddy footprints showed him the way. They headed downhill where the path cut like a terrace along the hillside. He ran, and the trees gave way, opening up the vista below him.

  There they were, nearly at the base of the trail. A long pier curved like a crescent moon into the bay, creating a circular cove and beach just beyond Fisherman’s Wharf. Tabby looked over her shoulder and saw him. She screamed for him again, but Cutter grabbed her by the neck and dragged her forward as she squirmed in his grasp. He had a knife in his hand.

  Frost charged downhill after them. He could hear sirens wailing from the city, getting closer, roaring in from Van Ness and from the Wharf. Cutter was trapped, with nowhere to go, but trapped men had nothing to lose. Cutter looked back at Frost through the rain, and then he pulled Tabby down the crescent pier over the bay.

  It was a one-way trip, ending at the water. There was no coming back. They both knew it.

  Frost reached the pier seconds later. Cutter and Tabby struggled down the middle of the wide concrete platform fifty yards ahead of him. Behind him, the lights of squad cars flashed in the gray morning. He ran after Cutter, with the wind shoving him forward and rain falling across his face in waves. The pier stretched for a quarter mile, but Cutter couldn’t go fast with Tabby in his grasp, and Frost closed the gap.

  They were nearly to the end of the crescent when Cutter suddenly stopped and turned to face him. Waves on the bayside hit the pier and cast up clouds of spray. They were surrounded by the water, the hills, and the skyline of the city behind them. On one side was the Golden Gate Bridge, on the other side the Bay Bridge. It was just the three of them out here. No one else. Frost held up his hand, stopping the cops who were following on the pier behind him. He didn’t want Cutter spooked.

  “Let her go, Rudy.”

  He had to shout to be heard. He took another step closer and then another. His gun was pointed straight ahead, but he had nothing to shoot at. Tabby was in front of Cutter. Frost couldn’t see more than an inch or two of Cutter’s face. And even if he wanted to fire, he could barely hold his arms level because of the onslaught of cold wind that buffeted his body. He was like a boat thrown around by the waves.

  “That’s far enough, Easton,” Cutter said. “Stop.” />
  Frost stopped, but he didn’t lower his gun. “This is over, Rudy. You know that. There’s no way out of this.”

  Tabby struggled like a honeybee inside a glass jar, but she was locked in Cutter’s grasp and couldn’t break free. His left arm trapped her waist. His right forearm kept her neck in a headlock, with the blade of the knife pressed tightly against the bulge of the carotid artery on her neck. Any tighter and he would cut her open. The more she squirmed, the less of a shot that Frost had on the man behind her.

  “What are you going to do, Easton?” Cutter called to him. “Are you willing to shoot? It’s windy. You might miss. What if you kill her yourself? Can you live with that?”

  Frost felt a roaring in his head. It was more than the wind. It was anger and despair creeping up on him. “Let her go. You don’t need to do this. It won’t change a thing.”

  “Not for me, but it will change everything for you, won’t it?”

  He knew that Cutter wanted him to see it happen. Frost had found the bodies of Katie and Jess; he’d felt the life go out of Maria Lopes in his arms. But he hadn’t seen the blade go across the throat, seen the spray of blood, heard the cry of pain. Cutter was going to kill Tabby right in front of him. He didn’t have a single doubt about that. Nothing he said, nothing he did, was going to change it.

  “What do you want, Rudy?”

  He kept using Cutter’s first name, trying to make a connection with him. But there was no connection to be made.

  “I don’t want anything at all,” Cutter told him. “You know that.”

  Frost needed a clear shot to drill through Cutter’s eyes, but Tabby blocked the way. If he pulled the trigger, he’d hit her. If he fired into Cutter’s arm, the bullet would go through him and into Tabby’s chest. The only way to fire without hitting Tabby was to get a clean angle on Cutter’s head, and he didn’t have it.

  Meanwhile, Tabby flailed, hot and angry. Cutter held her. Frost stared down the barrel of his gun and tried to hold it steady as the gusts pushed around his arms. He kept blinking as the rain flooded his eyes. The bay went wild around them.

  “Drop the knife!” Frost shouted, as if through sheer force of will, he could get inside Cutter’s brain and turn him around. As if he could change the future. As if he could rewrite the past.

  But he couldn’t.

  Instead, something came over Cutter’s face. It was as terrifying as the whiteness of a shark’s eyes as it rolls them back before an attack. Cutter wasn’t on the pier anymore. He was in a tiny bedroom, standing over the body of his child in the pool of blood where his wife had killed herself. It was 3:42 a.m. The muscles of his hand tightened. Fury and bottomless grief brought a steely line to his mouth. This was the moment; this was the horror.

  Frost could see the next ten seconds of his life. The slash. The scream. Another woman lying at his feet; another woman he’d failed. Katie. Jess. Maria. And now Tabby. Dying in his arms.

  It was going to happen. Right. Now.

  “Frost.”

  The voice startled both of them. Frost froze. So did Cutter. It was Tabby, calling to him. She wasn’t moving anymore. She was absolutely calm, absolutely still, her knees locked against the wind, her body unmoving. Her green eyes weren’t afraid in the least. Only her wet red hair blew like a wildfire. Cutter was still behind her, his head impossible to reach, impossible to kill. The only thing visible, the only target Frost had, was Cutter’s arm draped across Tabby’s torso, with the knife at the end of his hand.

  Tabby said four words to him. That was all she needed to do.

  “Shut up and dance,” she said.

  Frost didn’t hesitate for a millisecond. He fired. He fired perfectly. The bullet traveled across the short space of air, faster than Cutter could shove in the blade, faster than the sound of the gun. The bullet burrowed into the exact square inch Frost had targeted, carving through the bone, muscles, and nerves of Cutter’s forearm, paralyzing his wrist and causing the knife to clatter harmlessly to the concrete pier.

  Tabby screamed. The bullet hit her, too. It went through Cutter’s arm and into the flesh of her chest below her right shoulder. Despite the pain, despite the blood, she escaped from Cutter’s grasp and ran to Frost. Her hands were tied at her back; she stumbled, trying to stay upright. Behind her, Cutter looked dazed. He backed away, his right arm hanging uselessly at his side.

  Frost shouted over his shoulder at the police officers storming down the pier behind him. “Get a medical kit and an ambulance out here now, now, now!”

  He gathered up Tabby tightly with his left arm, and she leaned her weight into him. Her head bowed into his shoulder, her forehead against his cheek. He could feel her trembling with cold and shock. His gun was still in his other hand, pointed across the pier at Rudy Cutter.

  “Get on your knees, Cutter,” he told him.

  Cutter blinked rapidly. Blood ran down his arm and dripped to the pier, where it was washed away in the rain. He looked over his shoulder, but there was nowhere to run. All that was behind him was the bay. The rain sheeted across him; the wind looked as if it would blow him over. He took an unsteady step forward, toward Frost and Tabby. They were no more than ten feet apart.

  “On your knees!” Frost repeated.

  Cutter sank slowly and awkwardly to his knees. The knife was still on the concrete directly in front of him. He bent and reached out with his uninjured left hand, and his fingers curled around the handle. He raised it slowly in the air. His eyes and Frost’s eyes were locked on each other through the rain.

  “Stop.” Frost aimed the gun at Cutter’s chest. “Drop it.”

  The clatter of the boots from the other cops on the pier was close behind them, but not close enough.

  “Drop it,” Frost repeated.

  Cutter staggered back to his feet. First one leg. Then the other. He swayed.

  “Take one more step, and I shoot,” Frost said.

  Cutter stayed where he was. He brought the blade close to his face and rotated it forward and backward, as if he were studying a strange, foreign object in his hand. Then he turned the sharp edge sideways and laid it against the skin of his own neck. He knew exactly where to place it.

  Frost shook his head. His voice was a low warning. “You don’t need to do this, Rudy.”

  Cutter didn’t listen. He looked up at the sky and at the rain streaking from the clouds. He licked some of the water on his lips and swallowed. His mouth opened slightly, and he inhaled long and slow. With a curious smile, he shut his eyes and closed out the world.

  “I wonder what it really feels like,” he said.

  Then he slashed his throat.

  47

  It was late evening before Frost made it across the city to Tabby’s hospital room near Golden Gate Park. His entire family was there. Duane sat by her bedside, holding her hand. His parents hovered near the door. Tabby lay propped in bed, her shoulder bandaged and her arm in a sling, and she was hooked to a morphine drip. Even so, she looked alert, not groggy.

  Seeing him, Duane leaped to his feet.

  “There he is! There’s the hero!”

  His brother, who was several inches shorter than Frost, grabbed him and practically lifted him off the ground. Frost reacted a little stiffly. He’d been getting a lot of attention all day from his colleagues in the police and from the San Francisco media, and he didn’t like it.

  Duane whispered in his ear. His brother was the emotional one of the pair, and Frost could hear a catch in Duane’s voice. “You don’t know what this means to me, bro. You saved her. I can’t even tell you what I would have done if something had happened to that girl.”

  Frost responded with a half smile. “I know.”

  Duane steered him to Tabby’s bedside and shook his shoulders so hard that Frost felt dizzy. “Is this guy amazing?” Duane bellowed in what was definitely not a hospital voice. “Amazing!”

  Tabby stared at him from behind those green eyes of hers. “Yes, he is.”

  Her face
had a postsurgery paleness. Her red hair was limp. When she shifted in bed, he could see a grimace of pain. It distressed him to see her that way and to know he’d put her there. Even if he’d had no choice.

  “Cutter?” Tabby asked him softly.

  “He died in the ambulance,” Frost said.

  She blinked. She didn’t seem to know how to take the news. There was no happiness in her expression and not even any satisfaction that the horror was finally over. He knew how she felt, because he’d felt the same way all day. He took no joy in watching anyone else die. Too many others had already been lost, and they weren’t coming back. Cutter’s death didn’t repair what he’d done.

  Frost’s mother didn’t share their reluctance to pass judgment. “Good riddance. I hope he’s in hell.”

  “Janice, you’re still talking about another human being,” Ned Easton murmured. It was his father’s humanist streak, his willingness to allow mercy for evil, that had been a partial cause of his parents’ breakup. They had never seen eye to eye about that.

  “Barely,” his mother snapped. “I’m not going to apologize. That piece of filth killed my daughter. If it hadn’t been for Frost, he would have killed Tabby, too. I’m glad he’s gone.”

  Frost let his parents argue through their emotions. He stared down at Tabby, and Tabby stared uncomfortably back at him. Her attitude puzzled him, although he knew he’d put a bullet in her body. If he’d missed by even a little, she’d be dead. There was a lot he needed to say to her about the last few days, but this wasn’t the time or place.

  Duane pulled a chair from the wall. His long black hair was loose. “Come on, bro, sit, stay with us a while.”

  “Oh, no, thanks, I can’t. I should get home. I don’t want Shack freaking out because I’ve been gone so much. I just wanted to make sure Tabby was okay.”

  “I’m going to be fine, Frost,” Tabby murmured. “Don’t worry about me.”