Sidney Sheldon's the Silent Widow

by Sidney Sheldon

  Nikki listened to Rodriguez rant about Anne, and how Nikki had tried to ‘turn her against him’. He was growing more agitated, veering wildly from boastful revelations about having planted listening devices in Anne’s pocketbook and car in order to spy on their sessions, to increasingly bitter name-calling: Nikki was a predator, a pervert. She wanted Anne for herself and had badmouthed him out of sexual jealousy.

  As he rambled on, for the first time it crossed Nikki’s mind to try and look for a means of escape. Luis Rodriguez was plainly deranged. But perhaps Nikki could use his disturbed mental state to her advantage? She was a psychologist, after all. At a minimum she could keep him talking for a while, play on his ego to buy herself some time. In the end, though, if she was going to live she would need to distract him sufficiently to try to knock the weapon out of his hands.

  But even if she succeeded, then what? Run, presumably, but where? There was the elevator behind her, just past Willie Baden’s hanging corpse, the one Anne had taken with Luis’s two goons. But unless she actually managed to knock Luis out cold, Nikki could hardly afford to press the call button and wait. If she could grab Luis’s gun, get hold of it herself, that would change things. But glancing around she could see nothing she could use to overpower him, neither in the corridor nor the offices that lined it. She didn’t even have a purse with her; all she had was the set of car keys still clenched in her hand.

  The more she began to think rationally, and practically, the more her earlier feeling of calm left her and fear began to creep in. She wasn’t ready to die after all, not today, and not at the hands of this sadistic madman.

  There must be a way out. There just must be.

  By the time Goodman turned into San Julian Street, his shirt was drenched with sweat and his clammy palms could barely grip the steering wheel. Fear had churned his stomach and drained the blood from his face. It had dried out his mouth and elevated his heart rate to a relentless gallop that made it hard to breathe normally.

  The only upside to the fear was the adrenaline coursing through his veins, overriding everything else and compelling him to act: Drive. Park. Run. Draw his weapon. Yes, he was afraid. But he wasn’t frozen. Some deep-seated survival instinct reminded him that he couldn’t afford to be.

  This was it. Do or die.

  Life or death.

  The street was deserted, except for the occasional straggling seamstress, late leaving work, making their weary way to the tram stop on 8th Avenue. No one seemed to notice Goodman pull over, jump out of his car, and make his way at a jog towards the empty warehouse. About thirty yards from the front of the building, he slowed his place. Two burly men in dark suits, their biceps rippling preposterously beneath the formal fabric, emerged from the warehouse escorting a slight, young woman. It only took Goodman a moment to recognize her as Anne Bateman, Luis’s wife.

  The two goons led her to a town car with blacked-out windows. One of them displayed bloodied hands as he opened the door to usher her inside. They exchanged a few words with the driver, then the car sped away to the other end of San Julian Street. The suited men watched it go before drawing their guns and making their way into the shadows, one crouched on either side of the front of the building.

  Goodman tried not to think about the blood and whose it might be. What mattered was that he now knew for sure what he’d suspected back at the station: Luis Rodriguez was inside the warehouse. Anne’s ‘summons’ to Nikki to come and meet her urgently had been a ploy to lure Nikki here. Luis Rodriguez couldn’t afford to let Dr Roberts ‘disappear’ and reinvent herself. Not in this world at any rate. And Goodman knew why.

  Fingering his service weapon, he swiftly ran through his options. He was alone, and Rodriguez had at least two armed men in support, maybe more. He could call for backup – that would be proper procedure. But it would take too long. Alternatively, he could try to take out the two thugs on the door. But that was a gamble too. What if he failed, or if he got inside to find the place swarming with more of Rodriguez’s men? He’d be dead within seconds.

  Glancing around, he noticed a narrow passageway to his right. It wasn’t even a true alley, because no vehicle other than a motorbike could have fit down it. Instead it looked like it had been designed for maintenance access of some kind. Darting into it unseen, Goodman discovered two locked power boxes bolted to one of the walls, next to a very rickety-looking fire ladder. The only other thing of interest was a grate, almost like a cattle grid but with narrower bars, set into the ground. Reaching down, he gripped it tightly and pulled hard. Harder than he needed to, as it happened, because the thing came loose easily, sending him flying backwards with a clatter and leaving him staring into the entrance to some sort of tunnel. It might have been the mouth of a ventilation shaft, or an air-conditioning duct. Whatever it was, it appeared to lead into the bowels of the warehouse.

  Goodman hated small spaces. They made him feel like a trapped rat. But he knew the two men out front would have heard the clatter of the grate. Any second now, one of them could come tearing around the corner to investigate the sudden loud noise. When they did, Lou Goodman knew from experience they’d be unlikely to ask questions.

  There was nothing else for it. Easing himself down into the shaft, feet first, he grabbed the grate and slid it back loosely into place on top of him.

  Inching his way deeper into the darkness, his mind turned angrily to Nikki Roberts.

  Stupid, reckless woman! Why the hell had she come here on her own? Jumping to Anne Bateman’s command like a trusting lamb. Wasn’t Derek Williams’ death warning enough for her?

  Nikki might be beautiful and smart. But she’d got herself into deep water this time. Only Lou Goodman knew exactly how deep.

  ‘Tell me about Trey. Were you the one who had him abducted?’

  Nikki looked defiantly into Luis Rodriguez’s eyes as he once again raised his gun and pointed it at her, arm locked, ready to shoot. His long rant about Anne, and what he perceived as Nikki’s jealous meddling in their marriage, had reignited his anger to murderous levels. Nikki’s only hope was to keep him talking, and pray that his desire to boast would outweigh his desire to kill her, for a few more minutes at least.

  It worked. Lowering his arm, Luis rolled his eyes dramatically.

  ‘Stupid boy. He could have lived if he chose to. We gave him every chance.’

  ‘What do you mean, “every chance”? Every chance to what? Did he owe you money?’ Nikki asked, remembering Derek Williams’ theory about Trey still working for one of the Westmont gangs, and thinking grimly about the bills crudely crammed into Willie Baden’s gaping mouth.

  ‘He owed a little money, but it wasn’t about that,’ Luis said dismissively.

  ‘What then? You resented him starting a new life? Getting clean, breaking away from the gangs?’

  Luis smiled chillingly. ‘You confuse me with someone who had the slightest interest in Trey Raymond’s life, Dr Roberts. I’ve told you before, I’m a businessman. Trey wasn’t part of the family. He was a user. A customer. Customers come, customers go.’

  Nikki frowned. ‘Trey was tortured, brutally tortured before he died. What could he possibly have done to deserve that?’

  Rodriguez yawned, and Nikki felt a surge of rage and hatred rush through her body as if she’d been electrocuted. How could Anne have married this monster? This vile sadist? Even if she didn’t know the truth about his illegal businesses, the fortune he’d made peddling despair and death, Anne couldn’t have lived with this man and not seen the casual cruelty that drove him. No one could be that blind. Could they?

  ‘Trey Raymond had something I wanted,’ said Luis. ‘I offered him a fair price, but he refused to give it to me. That was a grave mistake.’

  ‘What could Trey possibly have had that you wanted?’ asked Nikki, her eyes filling with tears suddenly. So many terrible things had happened, she’d allowed herself to push the horror of Trey’s death and her grief for him to one side. But now, facing her own death, th
ey came flooding back like water through a breaking dam. ‘You’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Trey had nothing! The most valuable thing he owned was a stupid skateboard that Doug bought him.’

  ‘He had information,’ Luis said simply. ‘About your sessions with my wife, the ones I was unable to surveil myself. I asked him, very nicely, to deliver me that information. He refused. So he died.’

  ‘But … he didn’t know anything!’ Nikki gasped. ‘All our sessions were private.’

  ‘Liar!’ Luis snapped, irritated. ‘You keep notes. The police have copies.’

  ‘Not of my sessions with Anne, they don’t,’ said Nikki truthfully. ‘I never recorded those.’

  Luis looked skeptical. ‘Never recorded them? Why not?’

  Nikki shrugged helplessly. ‘She wouldn’t allow it. I should have insisted …’ She looked away, guilt and regret overwhelming her. ‘You were asking Trey to give you information he never had. No one had it, because it didn’t exist – other than in here.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘You killed him for nothing!’

  Luis paused for a moment to take this in. Then he started to laugh, quietly at first, but then the laughs got louder and fuller and more menacing.

  ‘And so the comedy of errors goes on!’ he said, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. ‘I’m glad you shared that with me, Dr Roberts. Truly I am. Quite the irony. But at least you can rest assured your death won’t be for nothing.’ Lifting his gun a third time, the look in his eyes left Nikki in no doubt: her time had run out.

  ‘Like all good plays, my dear, I’m afraid there must be a final act. And this is yours. Goodbye, Dr Roberts.’

  ‘Burn in hell!’ Nikki snarled back at him.

  And with a single, deafening bang, everything went black.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  First came the darkness.

  Then the quiet.

  No breath. No movement. Only stillness.

  Peace.

  So this was death.

  It was nice while it lasted. Unfortunately for Nikki, it didn’t last long. The darkness remained, but at some point she realized she could hear her own heartbeat, her pulse thud, thudding inside her aching skull. Time began to speed back up, but gradually, like an animal emerging hesitantly from a long hibernation. And when it did, the pain began, waves of it, sharp and burning.

  My leg. Reaching down her fingers found the warm, sticky wound. She’d been shot just below the knee. She realized then that the darkness surrounding wasn’t a product of her own lost consciousness, but a real, external thing. There must have been a power cut! Like an act of God. Only Nikki didn’t believe in God. In the confusion, Rodriguez must have misfired and hit her leg. Christ, it hurt. She wondered how much blood she’d lost. Touching the wound again she made a sound, involuntary, a sort of high-pitched, keening whine, like an animal caught in a trap.

  It was a mistake.

  She heard him instantly, turning and shuffling in the pitch-darkness, moving towards the sound, lunging blindly. Then a clatter as he slipped and lost his footing. He was cursing in Spanish, wheezing – was he hurt too? – but no. When he spoke his voice was strong. The quiver Nikki heard in it wasn’t pain but anger.

  ‘I hear you, you bitch!’

  She froze. He was close, only feet away.

  ‘I’m coming for you!’

  The darkness was total and instant.

  Flipping the main fuse had been an instinct, a spur of the moment impulse to confuse Luis Rodriguez and whatever men he had upstairs to buy himself some time. But now that it was done, Goodman regretted it at once. Trapped and disorientated in the cramped basement, he struggled to contain his panic. He felt as if he were in a coffin. No light! No escape! His heart raced, pounding wildly to the beat of his own terror. It took every ounce of his self-control to try to calm his breathing. In. Out. In. Out.

  Now think.

  He fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone. It wasn’t there. With trembling fingers he checked every pocket, realizing as he did so that the phone must be back at the office. Fortunately he had a Maglite on his keychain. As soon as he twisted the head, the light came on and reality reasserted itself. The lid of the coffin was merely the basement’s low ceiling, its fat, aluminum-clad pipes draped with cobwebs. Behind him was the opening to the ventilation shaft he’d used to get in, that led up to street level in the alley. In front of him, about twenty feet from the fuse box, was a set of rickety metal stairs.

  Goodman moved slowly towards them on his hands and knees, feeling warily for any live wires or nails or other hazards on the filthy floor. Everything was quiet. There’d been a loud ‘bang’ when the lights went off, but since then, nothing. Was Rodriguez even still in the building? He might have killed Nikki and left while Goodman was worming his way inside. Maybe I’m the only one crawling around in the dark in here?

  As he had the thought, he heard a scream from above. A single, piercing scream. Nikki? Drawing his gun, he scrambled to the staircase and began to climb.

  Luis Rodriguez froze and listened, eagerly, like a wolf. She was close, very close. He could hear her breaths, short and rapid from the pain of his bullet.

  His hand tightened on his gun as he lunged furiously towards the sound. Once he reached her, even in the pitch-dark he would find her neck and hold her down and fire a second shot deep into her skull.

  Bitch. Nikki Roberts had tried to brainwash Anne, to take her from him. Luis wouldn’t stop until Dr Roberts’ ‘brilliant’ mind was splattered all over the walls like vomit. ‘Where are you?’ he grunted, shuffling forwards. There was nowhere for her to go, no escape other than to go past him in the narrow corridor. And yet as he reached out he felt nothing but air. Where the hell could she have gone?

  The pain hit him then, like a gunshot. A fist, hard and determined, slamming at full force into the soft flesh between his legs. He doubled over, his roar of pain morphing into a dry retch as he sank to his knees. Behind him he heard scrambling, like the scuttle of a mouse racing for its hole.

  She got past me! The bitch scrambled straight through my legs! She’s going for the stairs.

  Still doubled over in agony, he twisted his upper body around and fired wildly into the darkness. ‘I’ll kill you!’ he rasped. ‘I will kill you!’

  I made it! I’m out.

  Nikki heard the shots ring out as she reached the top of the fire stairs, but elation trumped fear. Faint glimmers of evening light were visible here, rising up from the ground floor below. All she had to do was make it down these stairs and out onto the street. Someone would be there, surely? Someone would help her. Save her. But she must hurry. Rodriguez would be on his feet soon.

  Clinging on to the handrail she took one step, then two before sliding uncontrollably to the ground, writhing in agony. My leg! Adrenaline had seen her this far, but now the deep bullet wound reasserted itself. She couldn’t move. The pain was overwhelming. Hard metal tore into her back as she fell onto the stairs, blacking out for a moment as she rolled down to the first landing. Willing herself back into consciousness, she used her last ounce of strength to drag herself over to the corner of the landing, curling up into a tiny alcove cut into the concrete wall.

  For a moment she felt overwhelming sadness. Her eyes filled with tears. She could see the way out. Peering through the shadows, there was the fire door, no more than twenty feet below her. I’m so close! But she couldn’t get there. Couldn’t move another muscle. Nikki knew with certainty that this spot, this alcove was the end of the line.

  Closing her eyes, a strange sensation of heat crept over her. It was really quite pleasant. As swiftly as it had arrived, the sadness left her and with it the pain and fear, all three replaced by a thick, warm blanket of exhaustion.

  Sleep. I need to sleep now.

  At the top of the stairs, Goodman finally stood up tall, pressing his back hard against a brick pillar for cover as he squinted into the gloom. The high, dirty windows afforded only the faintest rays of natural
light this late in the evening, but after the darkness of the basement, his eyes adjusted quickly and he was able to switch off his flashlight. Satisfying himself that he was alone – the entire floor was one, vast empty room – he began to move stealthily towards the service elevator on the far wall when a familiar voice stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘Goodman! You in here?’

  Mick Johnson’s gruff, Boston-Irish twang echoed off the walls.

  No. How was it possible? How the hell had that fat slob made it here?

  ‘Where are you, Lou?’

  Goodman’s blood ran cold. Now he had two of them to worry about, Rodriguez and Johnson. He had to find Nikki before his partner did. It was either that or kill Mick before he made his move. He hoped it didn’t come to that. Despite everything, Lou Goodman still felt some kinship with Mick Johnson, some residual affection for his comrade of the last year. But this was a life-or-death situation. There could be no room for sentiment or hesitation.

  He started to run.

  Whacking his head on the low ceiling of the basement, Mick Johnson cursed under his breath as his flashlight clattered to the floor. Damn Goodman. Johnson had found his partner’s car abandoned a few blocks up and followed what he assumed had been his path towards the warehouse. Pausing at the narrow passageway as Goodman had done, he’d noticed the dislodged grate and put two and two together. With some effort, he managed to squeeze his own, more considerable girth inside, emerging as his partner had done into the basement electrical room.

  Goodman had come this way, all right. His shoe and hand prints were everywhere in the dust. Reaching down for his dropped flashlight, Johnson picked up one of his partner’s white monogrammed cotton handkerchiefs from the filthy floor, where he must have dropped it in the confusion of the blackout. Who the hell carried handkerchiefs in this day and age? Not so long ago, Johnson would have been irritated by Goodman’s vanity and dandyish ways. But not now. Now Goodman had shifted from ‘irritating’ to ‘dangerous’, a threat that must be stopped at all costs.