The dome light clicked out and for a moment, the only sound in the car was Dirk’s heavy breathing. Although somewhere in the back of his mind he recognized that he was in pain, his entire body seemed to have numbed itself to the sensation the way you get used to a bad smell in a matter of minutes; it was still there, but it just wasn’t something that you were preoccupied with.
Then Father Carter spoke, and the irony of having prayed to God for the strength to murder a priest suddenly reared its ugly head.
Dirk wished that he hadn’t wasted his mental energy.
There was no God, but if there was, he was a sick, sadistic bastard for what he had allowed to happen to Lauren and Timmy.
I’ll fix it. He’s going to pay.
“Is he going to make it?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Dirk caught Pike shake his head slowly. Instead of anger or perhaps fear, Dirk felt a sensation of relief wash over him.
He wasn’t going to make it. He knew that. But Dirk also knew that there was only one thing left to do, and when that was over, he could move on from this world and onto the next.
Or not.
He was ready for whatever waited for him on the other side, even if that something was a void, a giant, black nothing that swallowed his soul. Deep down, though, he hoped that wherever he went, his wife and son would be there to greet him.
“Fuck,” Father Carter swore. “No cops I said. No fucking cops—I knew I couldn’t trust the cartels.”
Again Pike shook his head.
“It wasn’t the cartels, it was him. Dirk was waiting in the grass, and he was spotted. He was supposed to do recon, find out where the girls were being held and then leave. Clearly, he didn’t listen to the last part.”
There was a creaking sound from the front seat, and Dirk opened his eyes.
The man before him was older than he remembered, and he looked as if he had aged decades during Dirk’s pursuit. And there was something else, too; back when he had been working with Yori and Tony, CD had been a young conman just cutting his teeth… but now, here in Askergan, he was different.
There was a glint in his eye. A yearning signifying the entitled light of expectation. Dirk got the impression that that was the only real thing about this man; realer than the phony white collar, the perfect haircut, the charming smile.
He was going to enjoy rubbing that gleam out.
“Why did you—”
But then he stopped when Dirk held up his right hand with the three missing fingers.
Carter squinted at him, and Dirk started to smile. When the priest spoke next, however, the grin fell off his face.
“What’s that supposed to mean? What happened to your hand?”
“Tony…” Dirk croaked. “Tony and Yori.”
Carter’s brow furrowed.
“You knew Tony? That long-armed dipshit Yori?”
It was Pike who answered.
“He called me Peter—shit, it’s been a long time since anyone has called me that.”
Carter’s eyes flicked to his partner then back again.
“You were there? Back then?” he glanced at Dirk’s crimson vest. “And you’re what… a cop? A biker? Undercover? What the fuck are you doing here?”
Dirk sighed and let his head come to rest on the soft, leather seat.
“This place just brings you back, sucks you in. You really don’t remember me?”
“No. Should I?”
This, like his eyes, was also real.
Father Carter Duke really didn’t remember him at all.
Dirk closed his eyes, fighting the tears that threatened to spill.
“Should I?” Carter repeated.
Dirk remained silent. It was unfathomable that after what the priest had done to him, to his family, that he didn’t even have the common decency to remember.
A silence fell over the vehicle. And then, like everything that wasn’t about the bottom line, Carter simply moved on.
That’s what Dirk meant to him; he held the same value as his parishioners, the Sheriff.
Nothing. They meant nothing to him.
“Fucking bleeding on my seats,” Father Carter grumbled.
Pike cleared his throat.
“What should we do?” he asked calmly.
“The Sheriff was clear. No cops are to die… but this, this sort of collateral damage, has to be accepted. But he can’t die here. Not in my car.”
“Then where?”
A sharp pain in Dirk’s chest caused him to lean forward suddenly. Pike went to push him back against the seat, but Dirk held him at bay with an outstretched hand.
A hand that was covered in blood. A hand that was missing the first three fingers.
“We take him back to the Estate. Let him die there.”
There was a pause followed by what must have been some sort of inaudible exchange, as the leather in the front seat crinkled, and before Dirk could take a deep breath, the car started to move.
As the Mercedes started to pick up speed, a plan began to formulate in Dirk’s mind. It was crude and full of holes, but like the Sheriff’s plan to get inside Sabra’s estate, he thought that its simplicity is what might just ensure its success.
With his face between his knees, Dirk smiled for what felt like the first time in forever.
I’m coming Lauren. I’m coming Lar and Timmy the Tiger.
Chapter 38
“She’s not here! She’s not fucking here!” Coggins shouted. “Where in God’s name is she?”
Sheriff White reached for his friend.
“Calm down, Coggins. Keep your fucking voice down.”
The man turned to him, his eyes wide. He looked very much like Walter had when he had been locked inside the single cell back at the station.
And Walter Wandry was a deranged psychopath.
“Calm down? Calm down?”
Sheriff White glanced around nervously. The narrow passage up from the sewer had led them into a closet of sorts, and after waiting in the dark—a body on top of me, pushing me to the floor, while the fire burns just out of reach—for five full minutes, they had finally mustered the courage to open the door.
To their utter surprise, they had found themselves in what was clearly Sabra’s great room.
It seemed almost too easy.
There was a massive oak desk covered in drug paraphernalia opposite the closet, and a tv hung on the wall off to one side.
In the center of the room, hanging from the ceiling, were three lengths of chain.
When his eyes fell on the two empty lengths, Sheriff White swallowed, unable to rid himself of the image of Nancy’s decapitated head in the bag.
The Crab sends his regards.
Sheriff White’s finger tensed on the pistol trigger. The door to the room was partly open, and every so often a biker ran by, drawn by the sound of gunfire out front.
Like Coggins, he wanted to burst into the hall, firing both handguns until he ran out of bullets, killing everyone and everything that breathed in this hellhole.
But that wasn’t the plan.
The plan was to get in, grab the girls, get out.
But there were no girls.
There was only a girl; naked, shivering, unconscious.
Corina Lawrence, one of their own.
It seemed too easy, because it was.
Where the fuck is Alice?
Coggins moved toward the door.
“That fucking asshole Dirk, I knew—”
“Coggins.”
“—fucking lying piece of—”
“Coggins!” Paul hissed, reaching for his friend.
Coggins spun around just as someone rushed by the door, and Paul yanked him out of sight, pressing both their backs against the nearest wall.
He laced a hand across Coggins’s mouth, and pulled him tight when he started to struggle. Out of the corner of his eye, Sheriff White saw someone stop outside the door, hesitate, then step into the room.
The biker looked right by
them and when another series of shots rang out, he promptly turned and fled, hurrying toward the front of the estate.
Only then did he let go of Coggins, who promptly spun around to look at him. Paul was surprised to see that his cheeks were wet with tears.
“Where the fuck is she, Paul? Where’s Alice?” he moaned.
Paul shook his head.
“I don’t know… but we’ll find her. I promise. But you run out there or shout again, and we’re going to end up dead. And Alice… Alice will be as good as dead, too.”
For a second, Coggins tensed, and Sheriff White thought that he was going to run.
To commit suicide.
To give in to it all.
But then he relaxed.
“Okay,” he whispered, wiping the tears from his face. “Okay, okay.”
Sheriff White strode forward and stared up at Corina’s naked body. He counted to three before he saw her chest rise and fall. The girl’s stomach was marked with red imprints that looked suspiciously like they had been made by knuckles, and a horrible tangle of bruises led from were the chains pinched her wrists and descended nearly to the soft skin on the inside of her elbows.
Despite what he had just said to Coggins, rage threatened to overwhelm him.
These fucking animals… using her as a goddamn punching bag.
He took a deep, hitching breath.
“Help me get her down,” the Sheriff instructed, his voice wavering. “We need to get her to a hospital.”
Coggins nodded.
“There has to be some sort of switch. You lift her up, take the pressure off her arms, and I’ll look for it,” Coggins whispered, suddenly composed, in control.
Sheriff White checked his watch.
He had told Pike to make sure that the cartels gave them at least a half hour. But with the unexpected bifurcation in the tunnel, and the fact that the shots outside had come early, he figured that they couldn’t have more than ten minutes before the estate was filled with bikers again.
Paul quickly moved to Corina and wrapped his big arms around her calf. He hoisted her up, and she sighed but her eyes remained closed. Coggins was right: her hands were too high up.
They needed to lower her to untie her.
His eyes drifted upward, and he suddenly felt his stomach lurch.
He had been so preoccupied with the empty chains that he hadn’t noticed the skins and apparently neither had Coggins.
There were seven or eight of them, sutured together with some sort of thick stitches, all in various states of dessication. He quickly averted his eyes, and his mind flicked back to the story that Coggins had told him.
About the storm, about what had happened at the Wharfburn Estate. The way the monster that Dana Drew had become had peeled back Oxford Lawrence’s skin.
It wasn’t possible… was it?
Coggins made his way to the desk and used the back of his hand to sweep the paraphernalia onto the floor. A mirror smashed loudly, sending a cloud of cocaine airborne and glittering fragments scattering across the floor.
Sheriff White cringed.
“I think—” Coggins said, but then stopped suddenly and stepped backward, his hands rising high above his head.
“Coggins? What is it? Coggins!” Paul hissed.
The man had just yanked the over-sized chair out of the way and was now backing up, his eyes locked on something beneath the desk.
Please don’t let it be Alice, was Paul’s first thought. But then he saw the glint of something metal, and a man crawled out from beneath the desk, an assault rifle in his hand.
“Greg?” Sheriff White gasped. “Greg, what the fuck are you doing here?”
Chapter 39
Williams’s heart was hammering away in his chest as he made his way deeper into the sewer. The last crack they had heard happened at least a minute ago, but the sound continued to resonate in his brain.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Six of them, just as remembered from before.
Back when there had been hundreds of the damn crackers. Thousands, even.
The deeper they went, the warmer the tunnel got, and more humid. As it was, he had to wipe the sweat from his brow every few minutes.
“How far does this go?” Reggie whispered beside him.
“Don’t know,” he replied quickly. His voice was tighter than expected. “Wasn’t on the map… the blueprints.”
He sprayed his flashlight against the wall, and realized that it was caked with what looked like dried mud or dirt. Curious, he reached out and rubbed at it with his hand. A large chunk fell away and landed on ground, revealing a dull metal, metal that looked much older than the tunnel at the bifurcation had appeared.
“What the hell?” he whispered, turning to Reggie. “It looks old. Like it was here before. But…” he shook his head. “But my men never mentioned this when they were cleaning out the rats. They would have told me if…” he let his sentence trail off.
Reggie leaned in and checked it out for himself.
“Doesn’t look like it’s even from the same decade. Look at this here,” the large deputy used his finger to remove more of the caked dirt. “US-809 Marrow 2. What the fuck is that?”
Williams shook his head.
Marrow 2?
He had no clue what it meant. He moved his flashlight along the wall. There were other markings, he realized. Markings that looked to be serial numbers or GPS coordinates, maybe.
Or maybe they were just numbers so that whoever built this tunnel could put the pieces together the right way.
But why is this tunnel so different from the other?
“Let’s keep going,” Reggie instructed, and Williams nodded, taking a step forward. A dozen more steps and the heat increased another three or four degrees. His shirt was beginning to stick uncomfortably to his narrow chest.
And there was something else, too. A thrum in the air, something that seemed almost electrical in nature.
“You hear that, Reggie? That—”
“Yeah,” the big man said, turning his head upward slightly. “Sounds like a power plant or something. When I was younger, I lived beside a—”
There was a loud crack from behind them, and Williams whipped his arm around, leading with the flashlight.
He saw a shadow of a creature, one of the crackers, white, small, chitinous, slide out of view. The gun at his side suddenly lined up with his flashlight.
“You see that?”
Reggie was beside him again, leveling his shotgun at the ceiling. The tunnel had started to widen ever since they had entered the bifurcation, and now it was nearly ten feet high at its apex. Even with the powerful flashlighst they had taken from Maselo’s there were still far too many shadows for either of their liking.
“I saw… something.”
“It was one of those things,” Williams whispered, moving the flashlight back and forth. “I saw its shell.”
Reggie swallowed audibly.
“I—I thought they were all dead. I thought Coggins…”
“We should go back,” Williams whispered, his courage from ten minutes ago suddenly gone. “Let’s head back.”
There was another series of cracks, this time echoing up and down the metal tube and Williams whipped his flashlight about frantically, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from.
He saw nothing. Only more damn shadows.
“Fuck that,” Reggie said in his ear and Williams jumped. “We keep going.”
Williams held his breath for a moment as the last of the cracks faded away.
He didn’t want to go back that way, the way that the sounds had come from either, but he didn’t know if continuing forward was a good idea, either.
“Fuck it,” he said at last. “Let’s keep going. You watch my six.”
Reggie hesitated, a queer expression on his face. Williams had to remind himself that Reggie had been a deputy for the grand equivalent of about an hour or so.
“My
back; watch my back.”
“Got it.”
Together, the two men headed even deeper into the tunnel, sweat coating their fear-stricken faces.
Chapter 40
“She’s mine. She took my son from me, now I will take her life. And everyone in Askergan will pay,” Donnie hissed as he crawled out from beneath the desk.
Sheriff White leveled the pistol in his right hand at the man while at the same time adjusting his grip on Corina’s lower half with his other.
“Greg, we thought… what the fuck, Greg. We—we thought you had left Askergan. We didn’t even… what are you doing?” Sheriff White was so confused that he could barely put together an intelligible sentence. “This is insanity! Greg, put the—”
“My name isn’t fucking Greg!” he bellowed. “My name is Donnie Wandry!”
Sheriff White only stared, dumbfounded.
Donnie Wandry?
Donnie laughed, and realization washed over the Sheriff—it was his eyes. Both Donnie and Walter had the same eyes.
The crazed man before him hadn’t been kidnapped, nor had he simply fled Askergan County. He had done the kidnapping.
“Yeah, that’s right. The Crab is my brother.”
It was very likely that the stress of losing his son, of the shit he went through with the Crackers, of nearly dying in the fire at the Wharfburn Estate, had caused his mind to break.
To snap.
This is insanity, Paul had said moments ago. Only now he realized that his words might have rung a little too true.
Donnie stood, stretching his back while keeping the gun aimed at Coggins’s face the entire time.
“You were there, weren’t you? You were the one who took out my nephew—Tyler—the one who started all of this.”
Sheriff White’s gaze darted first to Coggins, whose hands were still raised, to the shotgun that he had placed on the desk when he had started searching for the button to lower Corina.
“Where’s Alice?” Coggins demanded suddenly, taking a small step backward.
Sheriff White didn’t like the look on his friend’s face.
“Brad,” he said as a warning. A sinking feeling started to form in the pit of his stomach.
Stitches (Insatiable Series Book 5) Page 16