by John Lutz
But at a certain point Dred had come to see himself in a similar situation. It was simple, really, if he used his initiative. His role would be himself. The drama would be of his making. The ending . . . well, he would choose the when and where of that. And the means.
He wouldn’t, like the ordinary fools in this world, have to think first and foremost of earning money.
He knew where to find money, cash that, legally, should be his, anyway. The only problem was that he wasn’t . . . legal. He certainly wouldn’t want his name and photograph in the news as inheritor of a lottery win.
But he would like the money, his spendable trophy.
And he had found it, once, where he knew it would be and where others wouldn’t think to look. And it had been enough money to fund what would eventually become a profitable business in antiques.
So here he was, poised in the darkness so near the darkness of his past. For the oldest reason in the world—personal gain.
The rest of what was his.
When the moonlight was unbroken with clouds, he shifted his gaze through his high-powered binoculars from the pockmarked dirt yard to the slanted steel doors of the storm cellar. They were slightly askew, allowing a narrow shadow of an opening, as if beckoning anything that yearned for the dark. All anyone would find down there were spiders and junk, but it was no surprise to Dred that even from this distance he could see that the padlock on the heavy, rusty hasp was broken. Someone had forced his or her way into the claustrophobic storm cellar, seen nothing of value, and no doubt gotten out of there in a hurry. It was the kind of place you visited only in nightmares, when you had no choice.
But there was something in the cellar that attracted Dred now. It was time to satisfy his curiosity.
Had he left behind some of the lottery money?
He was sure none of the money was in a bank. No surprise. Mildred had had a virulent distrust of banks. And just to be positive, he’d surreptitiously checked the house long ago,
But he’d been in a rush that night. And he’d been eager to flee the storm cellar. It was certainly possible he’d overlooked some of the stacked bills.
He’d been gone long enough for the embers of fear and gossip to have cooled. The old house, and the violent woman who’d lived in it, had slipped into local lore, and existed only on the edges of people’s minds. By now, they needed something else to talk about. To think about.
Minnie Miner’s “report” would soon spread throughout the area, and the pickers would be back, some of the same ones who’d dug up the yard and broken through the wallboard years ago.
Another reason to move fast. Immediately.
There were a lot of places to hide money in any house. Dred knew all of them in this house, from the times he’d had to look for Mildred’s hidden booze or weed.
But he was thinking about the storm cellar in particular. The hell hole had served only two purposes that he knew of—a tornado shelter, and a dungeon. But Mildred Gant had found yet another purpose.
He stood up slowly and brushed pine needles from his pants legs. An owl hooted nearby, and he froze and glanced around. Nothing was moving in the night but dark smudges of clouds in a gray half-moon sky.
The law—maybe the state police; maybe Quinn himself—would soon be closing in, if they weren’t already here.
But the killer knew the hills and the woods around the house. He sensed that he was the only human being in the vicinity. Nothing out of the ordinary was moving, breathing, stalking nearby.
Time to take a chance.
He slung the binoculars crossways on their leather strap, so they rested just above his hip. Then he left the thicket of pines and began making his way down the hill toward the house.
As he got closer, the crickets’ ratcheting cry seemed louder. He listened carefully to the sound, feeling through it with his mind for a warning, but he found none. When he reached level ground, he circled away from the outhouse and approached the west side of the house. The storm cellar doors.
Dred saw that the steel double doors were rusted, in some spots all the way through.
He bent forward so he could see the heavy padlock more closely. It had been sprung, all right. He closed his fist around it to twist it out of the bent hasp, and the hasp broke in his hand. Rust again. Some water, at least, must be getting into the cellar.
He grabbed the hasp again and levered one of the wide doors open. It yowled on its hinges, hesitated at the vertical, and then fell to the side with a clang.
He opened the other door.
47
The cellar yawned before him, a black pit that for all he knew sank to the center of the earth. A damp, sickening odor rose out of the cellar, as if something had died there and was in the final stage of decomposing.
Dred put on rubber gloves, then his plasticized paper booties of the sort surgeons fit over their street shoes to keep the floor sterile. He dug from a pocket the small Maglite he’d brought and switched it on, aiming its beam into the cellar. There were the old wooden stairs, one of them missing. He played the beam of light around slowly. Saw the metal pail that had been his sometimes toilet. He smiled. Too much time had passed for the odor to be coming from there.
He blinked, and from where he stood played the narrow beam of light around the cellar. Near a stone wall was a broken and useless wooden bookcase, and next to it a decrepit cane rocking chair with a twisted back and one runner broken in half.
Junk.
A, B, C, D . . .
Dred became aware of the alphabet thrumming through mind and memory. Quickly he switched off that part of his brain.
He caught a shape off to his left and aimed the beam that way. The corpse of a small animal lay on its side in a corner. It might have been a fox, or a dog, that had gotten trapped in the cellar, or locked in by someone with a cruel sense of humor. If it was a fox, Dred didn’t care. But a dog? No one should treat a dog that way.
He made himself chance the broken step and go down into the cellar.
L, M, N, O, P . . .
At first he couldn’t breathe, and he was surprised to find that he was trembling.
Then a great anger came over him and he clung to it, converting it to righteousness, and he was in control.
Moving carefully, he found himself standing in a shallow puddle. That was okay; the treated paper boot was waterproof. The odor down here wasn’t any worse than up top. The dog, or whatever the remains were, had been dead too long to be overpowering.
Dred followed his flashlight beam across the cellar, and to the old cane rocking chair. Even in its disabled and broken condition, he recognized it. Oh, he knew it well!
The trembling began again, but he got it in hand. He was almost finished here. Soon he’d know if he was right.
He saw that the rocker’s seat was somewhat worn, but the cane still looked tight. The younger Dred who had woven the cane, sometimes with bleeding fingers, had done a solid job.
It was easy to turn the chair upside down.
What Dred knew, that no one else would suspect, was that there was a space between the top and bottom of the seat, created by a wooden framework that separated the two cane surfaces and allowed the one on top to give and stretch.
He saw immediately that the bottom of the rocker seat was as he had left it years ago, cut and pried open so he could remove the money, a dozen packets sealed in plastic with rubber bands around them. Each packet had been made up of hundred-dollar bills.
There was no sign that he’d forgotten any of the packets, or money that had been hidden by itself.
Dred could hear the hissing of his breathing now. It made him smile.
Rumor. The speculation of more hidden and unfound money was only that. Rumor, or a plant.
And here he was, almost buried in what had almost been his grave. At least he had thought so, from time to time.
Getting out of the storm cellar was no problem. He felt as if he might fly out.
He didn’t even remember surfa
cing, but here he was standing in the wide night alongside the home of his childhood. He couldn’t resist going inside and glancing around. It did seem that every possible place anything could have been hidden had already been investigated.
He spent about twenty minutes in the house anyway, making sure, eliminating one potential hiding place after another. The space behind the panel in the bedroom closet; the loose floorboard in the living room; the space above one of the kitchen cabinets, large enough to contain a bottle on its side. He had to break some molding to reach that one and find it empty.
Finally satisfied, he performed one small task, then went out into the night and began jogging away from the house. It would have been nice to have actually found more money, but he had satisfied himself that there was none. Quinn had devised a trap, and with the help of fate and coincidence the killer had entered it and left it before it could be sprung.
His rental car was parked out of sight among some sycamore trees, off the dirt road a quarter of a mile away, a black Chevy Impala that would not show in the night.
He unlocked it with the key fob, then slid in behind the steering wheel. Within seconds he had the engine running and pounding like his pulse. He sat motionless for over a minute, forcing himself to surface from his dream and use good sense.
By morning, possibly before, they would be here. The police and perhaps some treasure hunters who would be sadly disappointed. Not many treasure hunters yet. News didn’t spread that fast from New York to an isolated place in rural Missouri.
It was 10:45 PM. Clouds slid across the moon, casting among the trees the moving shadows of things gigantic.
Dred drove carefully, well within the speed limit, acutely aware of leaving the house and the storm cellar behind him.
He began to laugh.
He turned on the radio at high volume to music he had never heard. Laughed louder.
A move had been made.
Then an immediate counter move.
Like lightning chess.
He was winning.
48
New York City, the present
Hoo-boy!
Carlie, alone in her office and deeply involved with how to fit the maximum number of display gondolas among half a dozen supporting posts in a proposed electronics display retail area, let down her guard and told the assistant to put the phone call through.
A moment later, she pressed the receiver to her ear, identified herself, and her heart plunged.
The caller was Jody’s grandmother.
“How nice to hear from you,” Carlie said. Not exactly lying. She liked the woman, but a little of her went a long, long way.
“Are you a busy beaver, dear?” Jody’s grandmother asked.
“Not desperately so, but—”
“We are family, dear, or I wouldn’t take up your time, knowing, as I do, that you are a modern woman with a modern skill set and must, as we all must, appease certain inexorable needs.”
Like talking for hours on the phone, Carlie thought. She laid aside her plastic ruler, calipers, and calculations on customer patterns. Figures rushed out of her head.
This was, to be fair, only the third time today that Jody’s grandmother had called her from Sunset Assisted Living. The woman and Carlie weren’t even actually related, yet Carlie had been drawn into this blatantly manufactured, suffocating family intrigue.
How must it be for Jody?
But Jody didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps because she was dealing with an actual blood relative.
Jody’s grandmother continued firing salvos from New Jersey:
“I don’t like it that Jody is unsafe, being as she is, in many respects, Captain Quinn’s own daughter as well as my dear daughter Pearl’s. Of course I have a horse in this race, as some might say, though God knows I don’t regard Jody as any sort of animal. But I am her grandmother and want, as you might imagine, to see her safe so she can live through her golden years but not, God forbid, in a place like this. I know the joy of having a grandchild—two, I would like to say, dear, including you—and wish for both of you the same satisfaction and success in life.”
“Your being where you are doesn’t seem to interfere with your enjoyment of having a granddaughter,” Carlie pointed out, using the singular to try to pull back a little.
“I’ve been made a gift of two such wonderful creatures and every hour of every day count my blessings, such as they are. In this dreadful place, if you count your blessings and get to two, you’re doing better than most doomed souls.”
“It really doesn’t seem that terrible,” Carlie said, trying to cheer her up. “I mean, with assisted living, think of all the things you don’t have to worry about.”
“You mean like death?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Mr. Cammeralter, three doors down, is an example.”
“Of what?
“He seemed, poor man that he was, happily unconcerned, but his heart was unaware of his state of bliss and exploded in his chest. He passed three nights ago.”
“That’s truly a shame. Still—”
“It’s a simple favor I’m imploring of you, dear.”
“Favor?”
“Yes. Help me please to convince my headstrong granddaughter Jody to move out of the city. Her place should be here in New Jersey, where she is nearby and safer. Being Captain Quinn’s surrogate daughter makes her a natural target for this horrible killer who has, for twisted reasons of his own, limited his victims to Manhattan. At any time his grim and grisly plan—and they do plan, such people—might include Jody. Jody would, like so many young women of independent and dangerous means in Manhattan, be safer in New Jersey.”
“I don’t believe,” Carlie said, “that I ever heard of someone moving to New Jersey to be safer.”
“Think about it statistically, dear.”
Carlie had to admit that Jody’s grandmother might have something there. With this killer. Statistically. But Carlie knew how Jody would feel about her grandmother’s suggestion. Thought she knew, anyway.
“Jody’s a working attorney in the state of New York,” Carlie said. “I’m sure she’d be grateful that you have her welfare at heart, but it seems to me it would be impossible for her to live in a different state from the one where she’s licensed to practice law.”
“Oh, look at the expensive areas of Connecticut and New Jersey and even Philadelphia. All within easy commuting distance. In any of those places you couldn’t close your eyes and shoot off a gun without hitting a New York lawyer. Or for that matter, physician. Did I ever tell you about Doctor Milton Kahn?”
“Yes, yes,” Carlie said.
“Jody’s mother’s repetitive avoidance, and in fact rejection, of that fine man is another example of her headstrongness that works against her so that she’s her own worst enemy and doesn’t realize it. Jody seems to have inherited that persistent oppositional outlook. Such opportunities as Doctor Milton Kahn come along rarely. Missed opportunities are the plums of life.”
Carlie wondered what that meant.
“They eventually become tiny, shriveled prunes.”
Ah!
“Jody is exactly like her mother in her obstinacy. We might blame heredity, dear. Itself a close sibling of fate.”
Carlie hadn’t though of it that way, but it made a certain kind of sense.
“Well,” Carlie said, “I’d better get busy here or they’ll fire me.” She laughed to make it clear she was joking.
“They would be utter fools to fire a woman of your caliber.”
What am I, a gun?
“Though the place is probably run by men who hire and fire women for reasons all the time unconnected to work, though they themselves are too obtuse to recognize the turn of mind it takes to sacrifice willingly quality home life for the cause of quality work—”
“I wouldn’t want to put my boss to the test,” Carlie said, not mentioning that her boss was a black woman who knew full well how men thought. Or didn’t.
&n
bsp; “You will speak to Captain Quinn about Jody’s increasing vulnerability?”
“I promise I will.”
“That horrible woman with the TV news show doesn’t help any. Molly—”
“Minnie.”
“Miller.”
“Miner.”
“Whatever she calls herself, she should be taken off the air.”
“Many people agree with you.” But a couple of million don’t.
“Do talk to—”
“I will. I promise. Please don’t worry. Oh-oh . . . darn! You’re beginning to break up. The old phone lines in this building . . .”
“Captain Quinn will see the train at the end of the—”
Carlie hung up her phone, feeling guilty, guilty....
49
Quinn and Pearl, and a dozen Missouri State Police officers, held their positions around the ravaged shack that had been the home of Mildred Gant and her son, Dred. They had been on station since a few minutes past midnight, waiting for the killer to come for the rest of his money.
A Captain Milligan was crouched next to Quinn in a small clearing halfway up the hill from the front of the rundown house. It was a moonlit night, but with fast moving clouds. Quinn knew night vision goggles and scopes were being used; it was doubtful the killer could make his way into the house without being seen.
And as soon as he was inside, the signal would be given to advance on the house.
It was a solid plan, if the killer didn’t suspect it was a trap.
And it wasn’t a hopeless plan if he did suspect. The temptation to remove money—if he had some idea of where it was hidden—and outwit Quinn and the rest of his pursuers would be strong in the killer. He was like the rest of them, playing a game. Life was a game. Death was a game.
Luck was the wild card.
Dawn arrived, but not the killer. Not unless he’d somehow managed to sneak in and out without being seen.
It had been only around six hours since the possibility of hidden money had been revealed by Minnie Miner. Quinn and Pearl were on a red-eye flight that laid over in Pittsburgh and then continued to Kansas City. They’d rented a car in Kansas City. Pearl drove, while Quinn talked to the state police about how and when to set the trap. Wasting no time getting here.