Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  “Now get down to the floor, on your butts,” he said.

  Walker and Muertos went down, back to back, sitting on the floor, and the guy then flexicuffed each of their ankles.

  “All right,” he said to his partner. “Help me scoot them over.”

  As the other guy holstered his Glock, Walker saw a Homeland Security ID clipped to his belt. The two agents pulled and slid a collective 350 pounds across the polished floor until the captives were hard up against a leg of the table.

  “Now what?” the other guy said.

  “We put the table leg through their flexicuffs.”

  The guy looked at the table. “We’re gonna lift that table?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Nu-ah. I’ve got a bad back. And that table’s gotta be the best part of a ton. Look at it. That’s solid mahogany or something. I bet they built the house around it. Maybe it was made from an old stump that grew here, and it was too hard to entirely remove, so they just pushed it over, hewed it in half, polished it and called it the dining room table.”

  “Hewed?”

  “Yeah. Like hewn. Past tense.”

  “Not sure hewed is the right word.”

  “Well, anyway, my back’s sore just thinking about all this.”

  “You got any ideas?”

  “Just shoot them.”

  “With my service pistol?”

  “Right . . .” The guy looked around. “You could use a knife. Or choke ’em out.”

  “You choke ’em out.”

  The two men stared at each other in silence for a minute before the first one said, “How many flexicuffs have you got?”

  “Rest of the pack.”

  “How many’s that?”

  “The pack minus the six we’ve just used.”

  “Jesus, just get them out and count them.”

  “All right. Jeez. Don’t get your whatever in a whatever.”

  “My shorts in a hewed?”

  “Ha di ha.”

  Walker watched as the second guy took a packet from his jacket pocket and emptied the contents onto the table. Clear plastic, like they’d been bought at a discount store. Walmart probably sold them for hogtying whatever Walmart customers hogtied. Walker watched as the guy counted out ten more sets of flexicuffs. Each was made out of half-inch-thick ribbons of near unbreakable plastic. They seemed content to leave them shackled here. Probably then call in to the local cops. The two of them found at a murder scene, with a Syrian national sprawled out on the kitchen floor. That’d attract the interest of the FBI, or Homeland Security—perhaps even these very two fine agents. These two may even get a legitimate promotion out of it.

  “That’ll do it,” the other guy said, doing a quick count.

  “For what?”

  “Link a few around the table leg, then use the rest through those and theirs, make, like, a chain out of them.”

  A few minutes later Walker and Muertos were attached, via virtually unbreakable plastic ties, to the table that weighed close to a ton.

  “You boys want to tell us what’s going on?” Walker asked.

  They both looked at him, as though they’d been unaware that he could speak—as though he and Muertos were little more than training dummies and this whole thing some kind of drill.

  “Ignore him,” the senior guy said. “Help me move the body.”

  Now Walker was worried. Without Almasi, this was no longer a set-up for a local cop to come and find. So, what then? Leave them here to starve to death?

  The senior guy went and picked up Almasi’s feet. He waited, hunched over, for his comrade to come and help. When that didn’t happen in a hurry he looked up.

  “You get the legs?” the other guy said.

  “Just grab him under the armpits and carry him out to the car.”

  “But my back . . .”

  The agent who’d been on the phone said something under his breath and moved positions, so that he was now crouched down and had his hands under Almasi’s armpits. Together they lifted the dead weight and shuffled it out of the room and down the hall; they were out of sight to Walker, but he heard a thud and some swearing and some rearranging.

  “What do you think they’re going to do with us?” Muertos asked in a whisper.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Nothing, yet,” Walker said. He heard a car boot slam shut, and then footsteps nearing, crunching on the gravel outside; no need for a quiet approach this time, their outside-grit-covered shoes stomping up the hallway. “Just wait and see what’s what. We can’t give them an easy excuse to kill us.”

  The two agents came back in, and immediately one started to rifle through the kitchen drawers while the other turned on all the gas elements on the stove, then the oven, leaving the door open.

  “Bingo,” the searching agent said, holding up a barbecue fire-lighter.

  “Okay, start it in the front room,” the other guy said. “We want the gas to fill the house right up before it goes boom.”

  41

  “Walker?” Muertos said as the front door of the house slammed shut.

  “Yeah?” he replied, shifting his weight and testing the resistance on the flexicuffs that bound them together and to the table.

  “What do we do?”

  Walker heard the agents’ car drive off, the tires spinning on gravel. “We get out of here before the place goes boom.”

  “I can already smell the gas.”

  “And I can smell the fire they started at the front of the house. Plastics and nylons—the curtains in the sitting room, probably. It’ll spread to the carpet next, then the sofas and soft furnishings. And that’s about it before things go kaboom.”

  “How long have we got?”

  “Minutes.” He looked at the stove and oven, the kind of industrial eight-burner cooking machine that just might have been dreamed up by Martha Stewart when she was sitting in a cell with nothing better to do.

  “How many minutes?”

  “Maybe ten.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Gas dissipates evenly—it’s spewing out of this room and all through the house. It’ll take a bit of time to build up to a point where it’ll ignite.”

  “Ten minutes is a bit of time?”

  “Maybe five.”

  “Five!”

  Walker’s shoulder was hard against the under-edge of the table, and he tried to get some leverage by drawing a leg in and then sliding it under his butt and pushing upward—but it was no use. That table was going nowhere. Lifting his weight and that of Muertos on one bent leg was one thing; the huge slab of timber was another.

  “Lie to your side—your left side, on the floor,” Walker said.

  Muertos did so, and Walker lay to his right. He moved, trying to use his leg to press the table up. If he could get it just a half-inch off the floor, he could work the flexicuffs under it. He twisted, pushed.

  Muertos screamed.

  “Sorry,” Walker said. He eased off the pressure.

  “You almost broke my wrists.”

  Walker looked up at the table, sweat running into his eyes. “Okay, listen,” he said. “I see two options. I can try again to lift the table, then you pull down on the cuffs to get them off the leg.”

  “I can barely feel my hands.”

  “You won’t feel anything soon enough if we don’t try.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or we can try to shift the table, toward the glass door, use it like a battering ram—and if we get it to bust out the door, a table leg might even push off the step and tip over.”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay. Let’s try that. Sit back up.”

  They sat up in unison, back to back. He pressed his right arm and shoulder against the foot-square table leg and pressed the soles of his feet against the floor.

  “Pushing now,” Walker said.

  The table barely moved. But his socked feet did. It was useless. Muertos gave a little grunt an
d he heard her shoes squeaking against the polished floor in the effort.

  “Stop,” Walker said. “Go back on your side. New plan.”

  They lay back down. Walker on his right. Muertos on her left.

  He braced his leg up, bent at the knee, his foot wedged under the edge as he felt the tension against his binds on Muertos. He calculated the extra angle he needed: a few more degrees. The gas and smoke smells were getting stronger, and he started to feel light-headed.

  “Muertos?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m really sorry about this.”

  “What? Wait—what!?”

  Walker didn’t answer. He moved fast. Turned further onto his side, working hard against the binds, to get more of his back against the floor. Muertos screamed at the pressure on her wrists, and he felt a pop in the binds behind him that gave him more freedom of movement. He lifted his leg so he could push straight up.

  The table lifted a quarter-inch. He strained and pulled at the binds behind him while pressing up with his legs. The table lifted a little more. Muertos was screaming. He felt a stabbing pain in his stomach, and the back of his right thigh was burning and started to knot, his muscles tearing under the strain.

  “Push your hands to the floor!” Walker shouted as he pressed up with his leg and gave everything he had, pushing his hands as close to the floor as he could and his arms toward the kitchen. He felt more play in the flexicuffs as they began to slide under the table leg. One of them snapped and he had more movement, and lifted the table a little more, now two inches off the floor.

  Walker’s foot was slipping. The angle of the table above him, his cotton socks soaked with the sweat of exertion, all combining to foil his effort. Muertos was quiet now, murmuring.

  “Muertos . . .” Walker said. He felt nauseous as the stitches in his thigh gave out and the wound opened in a slow-motion tear. Felt blood pouring from the newly torn skin and flesh. “Muertos, try pulling the cuffs toward the kitchen. You have to. My side’s close—but you have to drag your side out.”

  He felt her moving, slowly, against the pain of at least one broken wrist. She grunted and whimpered and her back knocked against him as she moved.

  Walker felt the cuffs sliding under the gap between the bottom of the table leg and the floor.

  Then his foot slipped.

  “No . . .” Muertos said, her voice shaky.

  Walker shifted and tugged at their binds and felt freedom—the flexicuffs had slid clear under the base of the table leg. The gas seeping through the house was nearing the point where it was saturated enough in the air to ignite against the fire raging in the front room.

  “Quick, we’re getting up,” Walker said.

  He did most of the work, and Muertos cried out as they stood, the movement shifting the broken bones in her wrist.

  “Back door,” he said, and they moved sideways like a crab, around the table, to the glass-paneled French doors. Walker tried the handle but it was locked. “I’m gonna lift you.”

  “What?”

  Walker didn’t answer. He bent his knees lower, found purchase under Muertos’s waist and lifted, then tilted forward and took her full weight onto his back, then he kicked the door. His heel connected with the timber frame, just above the handles, and the doors flew open with pieces of timber frame splintering out. He took the two steps down to an area paved with red bricks and kept moving, as fast as he could through the pain in his leg, carrying Muertos on his back. Beyond the deck was lush green lawn, and he kept running in his forward-leaning crouch, fifty feet, then a hundred, then started to head to his left, around the side of the house, toward the only decent shelter around—the big barn. The grass was slick underfoot, and he welcomed the gravel of the driveway as they neared the barn. The stones and grit bit at his socked feet but he felt he had good purchase, and made better time, and he went around the front of the barn to the other side, away from the house.

  He gently set Muertos down around the corner of the barn and kept crouched down so as not to move the restraints against her broken wrist. The whole front of the house was ablaze, the curtains a mess of orange-red flames and black smoke seeping out the eaves. The fire had worked its way up into the gable windows and pitched roof, through the ceiling cavity and along the timber joists holding up the second story—the house would explode at any moment.

  The barn was timber-clad, rough-hewn inch-thick pine planks set vertically, covered over with as many paint layers as the house. At least thirty feet wide by sixty feet long, double story, with a hay loft. Three windows and a door along each side, agricultural-sized double doors at each end big enough to drive a tractor right through. The roof was shingled and coated in tar.

  Walker picked Muertos up and moved along the side of the barn, where he set her down again, gently, and she gave a whimper as the motion disturbed her wrist; there was no doubt that the bones in her left forearm just above the wrist were snapped clear through at their thinnest points.

  Muertos said in a small voice, “What now?”

  “We need to get into the barn so we can cut ourselves free,” Walker said, trying the door handle. It was locked.

  “You broke my arm.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You had to.”

  Walker took that as a statement. “Move away from the door a little and turn so I’m facing it.”

  “Okay.”

  They moved around until Walker faced the door. He moved to kick it, but then stopped—

  The door was hung so that the jamb was on the inside. Maybe it was constructed like that for hurricanes or tornadoes. He didn’t think they had any of the latter here in Virginia, but maybe the guys who built the barn back in the Depression era were from Oklahoma or Kentucky or some place with lots of tornadoes, and they built barn doors this way so the force wouldn’t blast the door open but rather push it closed. The door was made from the same heavy pine as the barn, but smoother, the joins tighter. No one could break that door down.

  “Walker?”

  “We need to find another way—”

  Walker didn’t finish, because at that moment a huge explosion rocked the scene.

  42

  The shockwave from the blast shifted the barn, the structure creaking and moaning in protest at the sudden assault of the immense pressure wave. The sound spread out through the countryside and made distant percussive claps as it hit and echoed off far-away buildings. The gas explosion sent debris high into the air, and it took ten full seconds for the pitter-patter of falling timber and construction material to cease.

  “Let’s move,” Walker said, and he and Muertos side-shuffled to the front of the barn.

  The house was gone but for a far-corner wall supported by a stone fireplace and chimney. A cast-iron bathtub was embedded deep in a flowerbed. All that remained of the house were flaming timber stumps. The huge oven was nowhere to be seen, but the hardwood table stood close to where it had been before. The Lexus was on its side, the duco sandblasted back to plain metal sheets.

  Burning litter was scattered over the barn roof, and one of the main barn doors sagged off its hinges, forming a triangular space at one corner that was big enough to get through at a crouch.

  Walker and Muertos shimmied through, back to back, ducking and scraping.

  It was dark inside but for the dull light of the overcast day spilling through the small windows and broken section of door. There were no cars parked in there, no tractor, no livestock. Nothing but timber-slat livestock stalls each side, an empty loft and the fluttering of birds or bats in the gloom, spooked out of their perch or slumber by the brutal cacophony that continued to ring in the ears of all in the immediate vicinity, their movement filling the space with dust caught at the rays of daylight.

  There was a long workbench on the southern wall, a heavy timber slab of wood that looked like it had been carved out of the same tree as the dining table. This one was dusty and well worn, with two big vices set into it, and above it was a s
hadow-board with an assortment of tools: bow saws and claw hammers, screwdrivers and wrenches, chisels and files. Walker used his foot to knock down a two-foot bow saw, and then they sat on the floor. He fumbled with the tool and eventually found suitable purchase to work away at their binds. It took all of three minutes and they were cut free, then he used some tin snips to get rid of the rest of the flexicuffs. Muertos cradled her wrist in the front of her shirt. He moved with a limp now that the adrenaline of survival had worn off and the pain from the injury announced itself.

  “I’ll splint your arm,” Walker said. He used duct tape, old and not as tacky as whenever it was made, but along with four broken sections of a fold-out timber rule it did the job of keeping Muertos’s wrist immobile. He knotted two rags together and fashioned it around her neck to form a sling. “That’ll be as good as it gets until we get you to a doctor.”

  “She might have been in there . . .” Muertos was looking out the cracked window to the wreckage of the house. “Agent Hayes.”

  Walker was silent, joining her at the shattered window. If Hayes was in there, she wasn’t anymore, and there was nothing they could have done to save her. His mind went to their next steps. First, he wondered if he could flip the Lexus back on its tires, and if those tires were still good, and the fuel lines intact. Wondered if he’d find his boots sitting there on the front step, smoldering but wearable. He wasn’t hopeful on either count. Which left him with the barn. He turned and looked around the dark interior.

  “We need to find a way to get out of here,” Walker said, then stopped.

  “What was that?” Rachel said, hearing the noise and backing toward the door.

  Walker put his finger to his lips, then waited. He heard it again. A rustle of movement. Perhaps a critter of some sort, a big one, moving about somewhere out of sight in one of the stalls. Then something else, a muffled sound, definitely not a critter. Walker took a claw hammer from its nailed spot above the bench and made a wait here gesture to Muertos, then headed down the center of the barn.

  There were five stalls either side. Each was gated, about five feet high, made up of vertical lengths of timber, constructed from the same heavy pine planks as the rest of the barn. The first two stalls to his right contained rectangular hay bales stacked neatly and tightly. The first two to his left held a ride-on lawn mower, a forty-four-gallon drum of gas with a hand-pump attached, and tall tanks of natural gas. The rustling sound had stopped. The next stall to his left was empty but for a few rakes and shovels and pitchforks leaning to one side. The stall opposite that—