Sadie’s phone vibrated in her hand—finally!—and she lifted it closer to her face so she could read the text message.
We’re coming! Hold tight.
Thank goodness. She hit reply and then glanced out the gap in the doorway, not connecting the light from her phone and the men’s silence until she saw Mario staring right into her hiding place. She pressed the phone against her chest even though she knew it was too late.
Oh, biscuits.
Chapter 36
Sadie dropped her phone and then slammed her heel into the glass face when Mario’s pounding footsteps started toward her. She didn’t want them to know the police were coming. A moment later a hand grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly out from behind the door, throwing her toward a wall.
She stumbled in an attempt to keep her feet before catching herself. She turned to the doorway of the office, her only escape, and sank into a crouch, preparing to defend herself.
Mario’s shoulder rammed her back against the wall, knocking the air from her lungs and preventing the scream which had been bubbling up. He wasn’t taking any chances and, though she got a good elbow into his ribs when he threw his arm around her neck, he immediately pulled so tight that she feared he was going to snap her neck right there and then.
She gasped for air while going up on her toes, elbowing him in the side again, and scratching at his arm around her neck.
He pulled her backward, keeping her off balance and dragging her into the common area of the apartment. He threw her to the floor before she could plant her feet.
Popping lights sparked in her peripheral vision when her head hit the hard wood. She coughed for air but managed to sweep her foot against Mario’s leg, knocking him off balance—but not enough.
An instant later, Mario straddled her chest, pinning her arms with his knees in the process. He slapped a hand over her mouth before she’d had the chance to get enough air to scream.
She drew deep breaths through her nose, kicked her knees into his back and squirmed beneath him, but she may as well have been wrestling stone for all the good it did her. Mario was small, but he was solid and ruthless.
Realizing she wasn’t going to get away through her own physical attempts, Sadie looked to Rodger. He was standing a few feet away from them, his eyes wide and his mouth open in shock. Sadie tried to plead with her eyes—eyes that were like Wendy’s—but then remembered that he was part of having Wendy killed. He hadn’t killed her himself, however. Could he really watch Mario kill her, now? Was Mario really going to kill her?
As soon as she dared hope that wasn’t his intent, she realized how much he had to lose if she survived. She’d heard the confession, she knew Rodger and Stephen were involved, and she knew that Mario’s motivation in killing and leaving Wendy’s body behind was because of his family. She knew too much for them to let her go. The panic that had been building began to crumble into a cacophony of fear, regret, and, scariest of all, hopelessness.
“I can’t stay here,” Rodger said in desperation, but his voice lacked the mercy Sadie had hoped for. She stared at him, yelling behind Mario’s hand, which seemed to be pressing her harder and harder against the floor. “I shouldn’t have even come.”
“But you will leave me to do the work,” Mario said over his shoulder. “Again.” Sadie tried to lift her head, and he shoved it hard against the floor again, initiating more lights in her periphery. “You know why we killed your sister?” Mario suddenly yelled at her, his dark eyes boring into hers. “She was too much trouble. She did not know when to leave things alone. Just like you.”
Sadie moved her eyes to Rodger again; he was her only hope. He narrowed his eyes when he spoke to her. “He’s right, you know,” he said. “Wendy ruined people’s lives. She was writing my wife letters claiming that I was unfaithful, did you know that? At the same time she’s calling me every day with this sob story about her life, she was trying to ruin my marriage. When I found out about those letters, I’d had it. And then she filed yet another complaint against Stephen. She was trying to ruin both of us, and it was working!” He looked at Mario as though tempted to reiterate Mario’s role in why this had all fallen apart, but he must have chosen against it because he looked back at Sadie, glaring. “Take care of this last thing for us, Mario,” he said, his voice terrifying in its sudden calmness. “Do whatever it takes, however you want to do it. I promise to take care of you and your family.”
Mario looked over his shoulder at Rodger. “I will go to the police myself if either of you do not follow through on your promise.”
“I understand. I’ll make it work.” He nodded toward Sadie. “Just take care of her.”
Tears flowed down Sadie’s cheeks. Could this really be happening? Was Rodger really going to abandon her to this psychopath?
Rodger turned his back on them and hurried from the apartment, the door snapping shut behind him.
Mario looked at Sadie, his face hard and his eyes glinting. She wanted to close her eyes against him, block out the sheer hatred and power she saw in his face, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cower.
“I made some mistakes with your sister,” he said in a soft and even voice. “Leaving the body was a risk, and it has not turned out good for me, but that is not the mistake I am talking about. The first mistake is the one I made when I chose to kill Wendy Penrose fast and without explanation.”
Sadie’s body shook with fear and anger, but her eyes were still focused on his face. In her mind she was seeing Wendy, the amorphous figure of her sister that had taken shape in her mind these last few days. Sadie realized that she’d never made the arrangements for Wendy’s body. She’d left her there in the morgue all this time, too caught up in rebuilding Wendy’s life to finalize her resting place.
“She was in the bath, her crazy hair up on her head. I pushed her under the water so hard and fast she did not even knew it was me.” His expression fell. “And now I am going back to Mexico forever, and Mr. Pilings has won again. My family will never have the life I promised them. They will never know what it is to have all the luxuries that you take for granted. Because of this, you will suffer. This time, it will be long and slow and horrible.”
He shifted his hand slightly, lining his thumb against the side of her nose, then he pressed his thumb toward the rest of his hand, pinching Sadie’s nose closed and cutting off her ability to breathe.
Sadie’s body reacted and she threw herself back and forth, screaming behind his hand and kicking the floor as hard as she could in hopes of alerting . . . who? Shasta, who’d found Wendy’s body and called Lin Yang?
“You are the only one to blame for this,” he said, unfazed by her attempts to get free. “Too. Much. Trouble.”
The lights in her peripheral vision became a fireworks show as she tried to fight the unwinnable battle. As the oxygen was slowly depleted from her body, her legs stopped kicking. Her senses failed her, and her vision tunneled into black.
Chapter 37
Sadie had heard once that the most alert of the five senses when sleeping or drugged or in some other way unconscious was hearing. It’s why fire alarms made noise. For her, however, it wasn’t sound that awoke her. It was the smell of smoke.
As soon as Sadie’s brain realized what it was she was smelling, her eyes flew open and she blinked at the smoky air. Her brain couldn’t compute where she was or what was happening, but she knew something was very, very wrong. When she tried to sit up, a searing pain ripped through her side and a failed attempt to scream informed her that she was gagged. No, taped?
Mario hadn’t killed her.
Yet.
She breathed through her nose and fell back into the position she’d been in when she regained consciousness: lying down but propped up slightly. She attempted to move her hands but realized that they were bound as well. Carefully, she lifted them—the motion hurt her side, too—but she needed to see what was impeding her movement.
Her hands had been taped
palms together, and though her fingers were free, her thumbs were trapped under several layers of thick duct tape. She attempted to use her fingers to pull the tape off her mouth, but without her thumbs, she couldn’t get a strong enough hold.
She tried to take a deep breath in hopes of clearing her mind, but the smoke brought on a coughing fit, which she feared would suffocate her again as she gagged and coughed into her nose. Her side ignited with each shudder of her body. Once she regained a steady breath, she used her fingers to lift the collar of her shirt over her nose, then she looked around. She was in a room, a small room a . . .
She faced forward and saw a shiny new faucet at her feet.
She was in a bathtub.
Just like Wendy.
A new level of dread tugged at her, and she tried to control her panic. She looked at her right side that was causing her so much pain. The blue of her shirt was purple, almost black, and a stream of her own blood trailed down the side of the brilliant white tub toward the drain. She had been stabbed, bound, and left in the bathtub. But there was also a fire.
She remembered what Mario had said to her. He wanted her to suffer; he wanted her to feel the terror of a slow and painful death. And by recreating the fire that had undone all of his plans, he would succeed.
Pete.
He’d said help was on the way, but that didn’t mean he’d sent a fire truck. How long had she been unconscious? Five minutes? Ten? San Francisco took fire seriously; how long would it take for the fire department to get to the apartment?
People were probably trying to get to her right this very minute, right? But Sadie couldn’t lay there and hope for that.
Think, she told herself, forcing herself to remain calm. Think.
One of the things Pete had taught her, and that her own experiences had solidified, was the importance of knowing your environment. She looked around at the newly tiled walls and stared at the small frosted window above the tub; it would be too small and too high to crawl through, and it only opened a few inches. Then she looked up at the ceiling, where she saw the grate of the bathroom fan. If she could turn that on, it would draw the smoke out better than the window would, right? It might also draw the oxygen out, but she couldn’t breathe with all the smoke anyway.
Was the bathroom door open? She took a breath and held it as she forced herself to lift enough to look over the edge of the tub toward the doorway through which smoke was coming in fast. Her instinct was to try to escape this room, this apartment, this building, but the fire was between her and the way out. And could she even make it to the stairs in the condition she was in?
She whimpered behind her gag as she lowered herself back down, her whole side on fire—though not literally. Not yet. She had to shut that door. This room had contained the smell of Wendy decomposing; closing that door might buy her a few more minutes too. To close it, though, she would have to get out of the tub, cross the room, and push it closed. Sitting up had taken everything she had, and yet if she stayed there, she would die.
She said a pleading prayer in her mind and then moved as quickly as she could to sit up, throw her arms over the side of the tub, and pull herself over the edge. She crumpled onto the newly tiled floor, screaming in pain behind her gag and feeling tears trailing down her face, which was pressed against the floor. She’d sustained a lot of injury in recent years—far more than she’d have ever thought possible for a fifty-something-year-old woman to survive—but she’d never felt anything like this. Already blood was pooling on the tile. How much blood had she already lost?
She attempted to army crawl to the door, but the pain of using her torso for momentum was impossible. Instead, she pushed herself to her knees, gritting her teeth and crying out, though she made very little sound. There was no time to let the pain ebb away, so she braced her shoulder on the wall and used it to push up against until she was standing.
The smoke was thicker when she stood, but of course it would be. She’d taught school for twenty-five years, and her second grade students knew to crawl beneath smoke should they ever be caught in a house fire. But she couldn’t crawl. Still bracing herself with the wall, she walked to the door and used her foot to slam it closed. Perhaps she should have also closed the bedroom door but maybe the fire was in the bedroom. She could hear crackles and pops, and the apartment wasn’t big enough for the fire to be too far away, regardless of where Mario had started it.
The closed door and thick rubber strip along the bottom prevented more smoke from getting in, but the room was still filled with it, and she could barely breathe. Sadie flipped the switch for the bathroom fan. A whirring sound filled the room, and she carefully lowered herself to the floor, short of breath, sick to her stomach, and shaking from the pain in her side. She feared she would lose consciousness at any moment. Sweat dripped from her hairline and prickled beneath her skin. She knew that paper burned at a temperature of 451 degrees—thank you, Ray Bradbury—but did apartments also burn at that heat? How hot would it get before the heat alone killed her? She used her fingers to pull her shirt over her nose again.
Pete, she called out in her mind. You’re here, right? You’re coming for me?
He would know she was in the building, but he wouldn’t know exactly where. Was there anything more Sadie could do? On another occasion she’d found herself locked somewhere she shouldn’t have been, with no way out and few options, but there had been pipes which she’d hit over and over until someone followed the sound to find her.
With that in mind, she moved as quickly as she could to the new cupboard beneath the new sink and pulled open the door. She wondered if Mario had felt any regret destroying the work he’d done in the room. Would he have felt more regret over that than for killing her?
The pipes were plastic, but even if they’d been metal, she realized she had nothing to hit them with. There was nothing in this newly remodeled bathroom: not a plunger or a toilet paper holder or even tools left behind. She leaned against the cabinet, tempted to collapse on the floor and wait for rescue, but her experience had taught her that any form of giving up could mean the end of everything.
She scanned the bathroom again, and her eyes landed on the back of the toilet, specifically the lid covering the tank. She pushed herself to her feet—the pain was excruciating—then fit her fingers underneath the porcelain lid. She counted to three in her mind and then pulled up on the edge of the lid as hard as she could. It cartwheeled off the top of the toilet, toward the tub, and hit the knob of the faucet on the way down before it hit the tub itself and broke into three pieces.
The broken knob started spraying water. Sadie hadn’t expected that—she’d just been trying to break the lid—and pulled away from the spray until she realized it was cold water. Beautifully cold. She stepped into the spray and let it drench her, hopefully buying her a little more time in the rising heat.
She hobbled toward the bathtub and picked up the smallest piece of broken porcelain, which was roughly the size of half a dinner plate. She looked around for something she could brace it with and saw the toilet bowl. After reminding herself that it was brand-new and therefore as clean as it would ever be, she dropped the piece of porcelain inside it and propped it against the side of the bowl. Then she started moving her wrists back and forth on the sharp edge, cutting through the duct tape and, too often, through her skin as well. She bit back a scream every time she cut herself, and the toilet water turned pinker and pinker. It felt like forever before she could wrestle one hand out of the tape and use it to pull off the rest.
A quick inspection showed a dozen or more cuts, some of them pretty deep, but her hands were free. She ripped the duct tape off her face, sure she’d taken a layer of skin with it, and howled with pent-up pain as she fell against the wall, breathless, dizzy, and exhausted.
She pressed her hands against her side and began crying in earnest, babbling prayers and pleadings and thinking about her children, the wedding that wouldn’t happen, all the life she had left to live, and t
he fact that she was going to die just like her sister had. Surely the police would find a way to tie this back to Stephen Pilings—lawyer or not they would be able to prove he was part of this, right? It was little consolation if it took her life to put him away.
The heat was getting intense, and though a lot of the smoke had cleared out, it was getting harder to breathe. She backed into the spray of water again and stepped over the side of the tub before sinking into it. She plugged the drain, hoping it would help retain the cold water. She picked up one of the pieces of the toilet lid, but when she hit the faucet with it, it barely made a sound. She let it drop back into the tub that was filling up with water made pink from the blood draining out of her body. She lay down, half of her face in the rising water. She began to shiver, which she found terribly ironic, and wondered if having her side wound in the water would cause her to bleed out faster.
More thoughts came to mind, and the tears that leaked out of her eyes had nothing to do with the pain she felt almost numb to now. Would Pete ever fall in love again, now with two women to mourn? This was so unfair to him.
And then she heard something.
A voice?
“I’m here!” she shouted, and pushed herself awkwardly and painfully to her feet. She stepped out of the wet tub and felt assaulted by the heat, but moved to the door and started knocking rapidly. “I’m here!” she yelled again, feeling the heat through the door. She paused and listened. Nothing. She said it again, “I’m in here!” She banged on the door five times, listened. Nothing. Yelled, banged, listened. Nothing. Again and again and again she did it, certain she’d heard something earlier and determined that if she died in here she would be found with her hand in a fist and her mouth open in a scream. Then she heard something else. A chopping kind of tearing sound. She took a step away from the door, but is that where it had come from?
The sound continued, filling the room, confusing her as to where it was coming from until a piece of the ceiling fell into the tub. She looked up then, and backed as far against the wall as she could. They were coming from above.
Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery) Page 29