A minute later he was entering the front door of Katie’s home, it had been left unlocked by her cowardly brother. He’d already been in the Monaghan’s house that day but knew the layout well enough from his previous visits anyway. He switched the flashlight on and took the stairs two at a time up to Katie’s bedroom door. He paused a few seconds with his forehead against the door to catch his breath and allow his heartbeat to slow.
What a cruel joke it would be to have a heart attack now, with her in his house and so close to having his way with her. After he got his breath back, he pushed the door open and went to the chest of drawers next to her bed and pulled open the top one. It was what he was looking for. He rifled through her drawer, slightly disappointed that her taste in underwear was so plain. There was no lace to be seen. He grabbed a few pairs of what he considered to be the sexiest and bundled them into a plastic bag he found hanging on the door.
Next, he went to the built-in wardrobe. He knew what he wanted in here and with his flashlight tucked under his arm he impatiently flicked through the garments one by one, the plastic hangers clacking as he searched for the little black number. Finally, just as he was about to give up, he found it, ripping it off its hanger and stuffing it into the bag as he headed back into the hallway.
On his way back to the stairs he skidded to a halt in front of the bathroom door and quickly went through the drawers until he found one with items of makeup in it. He plucked a half used red lipstick from the mess of items and bagged it. He didn’t know if it was Katie’s or her mother’s, but it would have to do. While his dear departed wife owned lipstick, the thought of his new paramour wearing the earthy tones his wife favored, or even allowing the same lipstick to touch her beautiful young lips, mildly revolted him.
The night was still and dark as he rushed back across the road to his home. He entered and locked the door behind him. Nothing was amiss, and he rushed to the kitchen and lit the stove to begin boiling the water for the spaghetti pasta.
Katie stood up when she heard the basement door open. She dreaded what the surprise would be. Was it an instrument of torture? Something sexual? She felt a bitter taste in her mouth – she thought she might just throw up if he showed her a sex toy.
What she didn’t expect to see was a Target shopping bag, just like the one hanging on her door. Her captor was puffing with exertion but was clearly pleased with himself as he placed the bag on the slab and gestured that she should open it.
Katie hesitated, suddenly sure it would be Jack’s head or something equally horrific in the bag.
“Go on! Open it!” snapped Dawson. “It won’t bite you.”
With trembling fingers, she reached over and pulled it open, keeping her face as far away as possible. Relief washed over her when she saw it was just clothes. He stood over her as she pulled the bag closer and reached in, pulling out her own dress.
“That’s my favorite dress on you. I want you to wear it to dinner. And the lipstick. I put fresh underwear in there for you too. I can get more stuff tomorrow. Whatever you think you’ll need.”
Katie felt sick. How on earth would he know about her dress? Exactly how long had he been stalking her?
She shook her head.
His smile slipped.
“What?” he asked, genuinely puzzled at her reaction.
“I don’t want anything to eat,” she said, pushing the dress back into the bag and sliding it away from her.
Like someone drawing a blind over a window, his happy face disappeared. He grabbed the bag and pushed it back towards Katie.
“Oh, we’re having dinner. Not being hungry is irrelevant. You have ten minutes to get changed.”
Katie shook her head again and suddenly his big hand was on her throat and squeezing it.
“We’re having a fucking dinner date. Either you get dressed voluntarily and we have dinner like civilized people, or I choke the life out of you right now and put the dress on you anyway.”
He squeezed harder and shook her a little.
“What do you say?”
Katie struggled to breathe as she clawed at his hand. She couldn’t budge so much as a finger. Motes started to dance in her vision and finally, weakly, she patted the back of his hand in submission, nodding.
Dawson let her go and she fell against the slab taking deep gulps of air.
“Good girl. I thought you’d see it my way. Now, get yourself dressed, I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
He turned on his heels and headed for the staircase. Tears welled in her eyes at the hopelessness of her situation. Her bravery didn’t count for much, he knew he had her beat and didn’t even bother turning around to make sure she was doing as he had told her.
“Ten minutes!” he called from the doorway into the kitchen, before slamming the door and locking it.
Katie grasped the soft material of the dress and scrunched it in her hands as she stared into the distance. There really was no way out.
She began to undress.
15
“How long should we wait?” asked Danny.
They had driven around the block and parked in a darkened street parallel to theirs.
“Not long,” said Jack flatly.
Danny picked up his phone. There was no reception or internet, and it was now down to a fifteen percent charge. Funny how the further a battery charge went down the faster it seemed to drain.
“An hour?”
“No. Twenty minutes max.”
“We should probably wait till he’s tired. It would probably even be better to wait till like one or two in the morning…”
“Are you crazy? I don’t even want to wait half an hour while Katie’s alone with that bastard.”
Danny nodded.
“We go in at 7pm, okay? I’ll take the gun.”
Danny wasn’t sure when Jack had taken the lead in their friendship but for now, given the circumstances, he was willing to let it be. He pulled the Glock out of his pocket and gingerly handed it to Jack.
Unlike Danny, whose healthy respect for guns bordered on fear, Jack handled the pistol in a familiar fashion. While his mother hadn’t allowed a gun in the home, even after he joined the shooting club, she had let his father take him to the range several times to learn to fire a pistol after he was proficient with long guns. Jack had taken to pistols like a duck to water. While he enjoyed firing rifles and shotguns, there was something different, more powerful, about using a pistol. It was more of an extension of your arm than a piece of equipment.
By the light of Danny’s phone, he quickly ejected the magazine then slotted it back in and chambered a round.
“Let’s get some air while we work out our plan of attack,” Jack said and got out of the car carrying the gun.
Standing under the tailgate of the Mazda, they selected the weapons. Danny took a small tomahawk and the baseball bat. Jack, in addition to the Glock, grabbed an eight-inch icepick they’d found at the Connor’s. He pulled the sheath off to reveal a sharp aluminum needle about four inches long.
“Hmm, don’t you think you need something with a bit more stopping power?” Danny snorted.
Jack didn’t answer, just palmed the handle and closed his fist so that the needle stuck out from the bottom. With a violent motion, he buried it to the hilt in a leg of ham they’d taken from the Connor’s.
Danny’s eyes widened.
“If the Glock misses and he’s in close, it’ll do just fine.”
“Fair enough. Let’s hope he doesn’t get close.”
Next, they discussed their plan of attack. Jack decided that the second story was their best bet for breaking in undetected. He would climb up the latticework on the side of the house and go in via a second story window. To this end he added a chisel to his small arsenal.
“He’s bound to have made sure the ground floor windows are secure, and if he’s got Katie in the basement it’s more than likely he’ll be down there than not. I’ll get in through a window while you wait on the ground. Once I’m
in we’ll decide whether I’ll let you in the front or back door or get you to come up the lattice too.”
Danny didn’t argue. He was beginning to get the creeps just standing in the dark in the silent street, let alone thinking about meeting a psychopath in his darkened home. When they were ready, they got back in the car and drove back to the corner of Jack’s street, pulling into a driveway around the corner and four doors down.
“We’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”
It was slow going in the dark – the night was overcast, the clouds dark and almost completely blotting out the moon and starlight. Neither of them had realized just how much ambient light their city generated at night until the power went out.
“Wish we had a flashlight,” said Danny.
“I don’t. If we accidently splashed light on a window or he happened to be looking out, we’d be sure to get a shotgun blast for our efforts.”
“I suppose,” said Danny.
He had a bad feeling about the whole exercise but knew there was no way of talking Jack out of it. Once they were on Loxley Close, they crossed to Dawson’s side of the street, sticking to the shadows of the neighboring houses until they arrived at the house next door. Danny shivered as Jack led them up the driveway and crouched behind the two trash cans next to their fence. It was only a couple of hours since they’d found the dead boy in the next-door neighbor’s yard on the other side, and the horror of it was still fresh.
“Looks clear,” Jack reported. “I’ll have a quick scout, you stay here.”
Before Danny could answer, Jack jumped the small fence that separated this yard from Dawson’s and disappeared into the darkness. Danny sat back on his haunches and sighed. After three minutes Jack hadn’t returned, and he began to chew his lip. He hadn’t heard a scream or a gunshot but that didn’t really ease his mind. He decided to stretch his legs and bumped his shoulder on the bigger of the two bins as he stood. It barely budged and suddenly the face of the dead kid was floating in his mind. What if…?
Don’t be stupid! He told himself. There’s no one in the bin.
The longer Jack took, the more Danny thought about the bin. In the end, he knew the only way to solve the problem was to open the damn bin and look. He took out his phone and swiped the screen. His battery was under five percent now and the screen brightness had automatically been dimmed to preserve power. Holding it in his left hand, he grasped the lid and slowly lifted it as he brought the phone closer.
That was when a hand fell on his arm.
16
“Jesus Jack! You scared the hell out of me!”
“Sorry, I didn’t want to risk calling out.”
Danny eased the lid closed, thankfully there was nothing in the bin but bags of trash.
“Well, a whisper would have been fine,” he said, his voice shaky. “What did you find out?”
“He’s in there,” said Jack, his voice betraying a hint of outrage. “I could see a sliver of the kitchen through a crack in the shutters on the side of the house. He’s at the stove, and I could see two place settings on the table. I think it’s for him and Katie.”
“That’s good, right? That means she’s…”
“Yeah, it means she’s alive. I still don’t know where she is though, and the rest of the ground floor is shut up tight, no way we could get in without making a noise loud enough for him to hear. We’ll go with the original plan. You ready?”
Danny nodded. He had a knot in his stomach but wasn’t about to tell the kid whose sister was locked in a house with a psycho that he had a bad feeling.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
They darted into Dawson’s yard and headed down the side closest to them.
“I’ll go up first,” said Jack. “You wait here, I’ll break in then come back to the window and tell you the plan.”
Danny nodded and watched his friend scurry up the latticework quickly and efficiently, his only difficulty coming when he climbed over the eaves of the overhanging roof that went around the edge of the second story. His legs dangled mid-air before he was able to pull himself over and disappeared. As Danny watched, Jack’s head, a darker shadow against the overcast sky, appeared. Danny gave him the thumbs up by the light of his phone before Jack vanished again.
A minute later, Danny heard a muffled splintering sound above him. It wasn’t terribly loud, but he worried that it was loud enough to be heard inside. There was nothing after that and Danny imagined Jack pulling up the sash window and disappearing inside.
✽✽✽
The crack of the window fastener coming free of the wooden frame seemed as loud as a gunshot for Jack. He knew it was exaggerated by the unnatural silence of the surrounds and his own expectation of stealth, but he pulled away from the window and lay flat on his stomach as he waited for Dawson to come running. He was a sitting duck and wondered if he would survive the fall if he had to slide off rather than face being shot from the window.
He let three minutes pass by before concluding he hadn’t been heard and inched his way back to the window and peeked inside. He had a better look inside now and could make out a large flat shape through the curtains. A bed.
Just behind the glass, he could see the window fastener hanging askew. The chisel had already lifted the window an inch and now it was just a matter of pulling the lower sash up as quietly as he could. He held his breath and slid it up. Thankfully it appeared to be well-maintained and slid up easily and quietly. He was pretty sure that a screech at that point would have ended his rescue mission.
When he deemed it up far enough, he exhaled and placed the chisel on the window sill then gingerly eased a leg through. The drop was further than he thought, and he almost overbalanced before his foot touched the carpeted floor and he was able to pull his other leg in. He felt his back pocket to make sure the ice pick was still in place, then pulled out the Glock.
He was good to go.
Jack crept to the door and slowly turned the handle, taking a breath before pulling it open slowly. Again, no squeak. Thank God Larry Dawson seemed to be obsessive about the maintenance of his property.
The hall he looked out upon was lit by a dim glow from the opening to the staircase that led downstairs. The candlelight he’d seen in the kitchen. Rock music he didn’t recognize wafted up from the ground floor along with the smell of cooking meat. Jack’s stomach growled in response.
He decided to quickly investigate the upstairs, hoping the music would mask any small sounds he might make. There were only three rooms besides the one he’d come through. He found another bedroom with a single bed, a bathroom and the final door opened on what appeared to be a study.
He ducked in quietly, his heart racing at a hundred miles an hour. He was pretty sure it hadn’t gone under 120 beats a minute since he’d entered Dawson’s home. It was a pretty regular study except for the odd positioning of a telescope at the window. It was in a horizontal position facing directly across the road.
Jack knew what he’d see when he looked into the scope but looked anyway. A magnified view of his sister’s darkened window filled his vision.
“Dirty goddamn pervert,” he breathed.
He didn’t know he had company until he heard a floorboard creak behind him. Before he had a chance to turn or raise his gun, pain exploded in the back of his head.
Everything went black.
17
“Jack! Wake up! Jack!”
He tried to ignore the voice. His head hurt really badly and all he wanted to do was sleep.
“Jack!”
The persistent voice wasn’t going to let him.
“Shuddup… lemme sleep.”
“Jack! Wake up please, before he comes back.”
A sliver of cold, hard fear sliced through the fog in his mind and his eyes cracked open. He was tied to a chair at the small dining table he’d seen earlier through the crack in the window and jerked his head to the right, wincing as pain shot through his neck.
Katie was sitting at the
head of the table. She wore red lipstick and her hair was pulled back from her face and tied in a bun. Her wrists were tied with red ribbons to the arms of the office chair she was sitting in, a strange accessory to the slinky black dress she wore.
“Thank God you’re okay!” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “I thought he’d killed you.”
Jack looked around, more gingerly this time.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. You were here when he brought me up.”
“Shit! How long ago?”
“I’ve only been here a few minutes.”
Jack took stock of his situation. He was in a regular kitchen chair with his hands tied behind his back. His ankles were secured to the chair legs by zip ties.
“Can you see what my hands are tied with?” he asked, twisting his body as far forward as the restraint would allow.
Katie leaned over.
“It’s a rope, you know, like a colored one…”
“Nylon?”
“Yeah, about a quarter of an inch thick. It’s around your wrists and tied to the middle slat of the chair back.”
Jack pulled against the rope. There was some give. He splayed his fingers and strained downward. His gun was gone but maybe the bastard had missed the icepick – the handle wasn’t much thicker than a pen.
“What are you doing?” asked Katie.
“I had an icepick in my pocket,” said a red-faced Jack. “I’m trying to see if it’s still there.”
Finally, the tip of his outstretched index finger brushed the rounded top of the icepick’s handle. It was protruding from his pocket at an angle and he realized it must have come close to falling out. He relaxed and looked at Katie.
“Did he say anything before he went?”
“He said he was going to make sure we didn’t have any more uninvited guests…”
“Danny’s out there. Quick, we have to get free before he finds him. Try and move your chair out and around to me.”
Fortunately, while Dawson had secured Katie’s wrists to the handles of the office chair, he hadn’t thought it necessary to do the same with her feet. With some difficulty she was able to scoot backwards from under the table and then push her way backwards to Jack in a wide semi-circle.
Lone Wolf: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (America Falls - Occupied Territory Book 1) Page 6