The red lights ahead of me began to seem friendly, a beacon in the darkness signaling a haven ahead, a hospice for the weary traveler. I wanted, more than anything else, to get wherever we were going. Men with guns were a danger within my realm of experience, a danger I could handle better than the irrational fear of being lost and directionless. Real danger—and real fear—would send adrenaline coursing through my veins, heightening my senses, sharpening my reflexes, demanding action, exorcising the numbness that was spreading through me as the endlessly telescoping tunnel of light and the low drone of the Nova’s engine became hypnotic.
I needed to do something, anything. I unbuckled and leaned over to rummage through the dashbox, steering awkwardly with my left hand. Credit card receipts, maps, straws and paper napkins fell to the floor as I searched for the comforting feel of stiff leather over hard steel. I found it and clipped the sheathed hunting knife onto my belt. I rummaged some more. A ring of colorful plastic keys—Melissa’s—and a Phillips screwdriver I had misplaced months ago joined the litter on the floor. My fingers closed over a small heavy carton. I straightened up in front of the wheel and shoved the box of bullets into my jacket pocket, feeling a little foolish because if I got into a situation where I needed to reload, I would probably be dead before I could do it.
The action, however futile it might turn out to be, broke the trance-like state I had been slipping into. I began to wonder what their plan was. Their plan was obvious. They were going to kill me. Virginia was Peggy’s Molly and they knew the cops were tailing me. They kidnapped Nikki so I would follow them into the boonies. And not for a friendly chat. They were going to kill me. And Nikki. They’d have to kill him, too.
I felt, belatedly, a cool hard anger building up inside me. Anger for Jessica, who, if she hadn’t been murdered, had probably been raped and had almost certainly made a movie she wasn’t old enough to watch. Anger for Nikki, whose friendship with me had made him a pawn in the fat man’s game. Anger for Diane Dobbs and Karen Baylor and poor, pathetic Brandy, who had also been pawns, casually forfeited to keep the game going. Anger for Peggy, another pawn, who would probably die, unidentified and unmourned, a lost child whose family would never know what happened to her. Anger, an intense burning anger at Virginia Marley, cute little Virginia, whose willingness had been a strategy in the game. And anger at myself for accepting that willingness without thought, without question, because they had always been there, an endless supply of willing women attracted to my size and my looks. I wondered, not for the first time, what odd quirk of ego it was that made me feel obligated, almost duty-bound, to take advantage of that willingness. The constraints of marriage had come as a relief, giving me a legitimate excuse to refuse without feeling guilty. Zachariah Smith, God’s gift to women. But the ones I wanted to keep always slipped away.
The needle on the fuel gauge was bobbing crazily at the E. We had been on the road for almost two hours. The lights ahead of me disappeared and I found myself making a hairpin turn. The ground to the right of the car dropped away. I was going up a moderately steep grade. To the left were hills densely covered with trees. To the right was a deep ravine. I could see the tops of trees rising beyond it. The road became a series of S-curves. Two or three times I spotted a stationary light in the distance.
I crested the hill and the road straightened out, giving me a good view for a couple of miles ahead. I geared down and the distance between the cars increased. The Buick was approaching another series of S-curves and didn’t slow this time. They weren’t worried about losing me now. There was nowhere for me to go.
Just beyond the curves ahead was the light I had seen, on a building of some kind in a big clearing set back from the road. The tail lights disappeared and reappeared as the Buick negotiated the curves. I was still on the straight stretch of road when the Buick approached the building. The tail lights intensified then the left one began blinking. A real creature of habit. Not a car but mine for miles and he was signaling his turn.
I slowed until the Nova was barely moving. Turning around and going for help was out of the question. Nikki would be dead and the fat man would be in Argentina before I found my way out of the maze of country roads. They were waiting for me. I wondered what made them think I would be stupid enough to go up to that building by myself. Did they know me that well?
A second later I stopped wondering about anything. Being a creature of habit myself, I had been making periodic checks into the rearview mirror. As I approached the first S-curve, I glanced into it again. And took a longer look. Just topping the hill behind me and starting down the straight stretch of road was another car, traveling with its lights off. I wondered how long it had been there. It didn’t matter. I knew what their plan was now. I was boxed in.
I pushed the accelerator down and increased the distance between the Nova and the dark car. I tried to picture the road ahead. There had been two or three S-curves. I was making the first turn on the first one. The hill beside me hid the building from view and the curve of the road hid the dark car behind me.
Now or never.
I stomped on the brake, shoved the gearshift into reverse, and jerked the steering wheel all the way to the right. I let the clutch out and as the car started to move, I opened the door and bailed out, low and rolling to avoid the swinging door and the front tires. The Nova backed to the edge of the road and went over, its headlights stabbing the sky.
The night was filled with the sound of metal crumpling, glass breaking, tree limbs snapping. The Nova’s engine coughed out and then there was a settling silence. I heard the dark car coming and dropped to the ground beneath some low, dripping bushes.
Just as the car came into sight, there was a dull whump that I felt more than heard, then my Nova went out with a bang. An orange glow lit up the road. I could hear flames but couldn’t see them. The ravine must have been deep as hell. The glow was already fading as the car stopped and two men got out.
They walked to the edge of the road and looked into the ravine, their heads bowed as if they were praying over my departed soul.
One of them said, “Takes care of that asshole.”
They probably hadn’t been praying at all.
“Think we should go down and see if he’s alive?” the same man asked.
“I ain’t going down there,” the other man said. “No way he’s walking away from that. We’ll be gone in a few hours. Take him that long to crawl up here if he’s alive.” They stood silently for a moment then the man added, “Must’ve been trying to turn around.” He yawned loudly.
I considered shooting them to even up the odds. I decided against it. Being called an asshole probably wasn’t sufficient grounds for justifiable homicide. Besides, the shots would be heard for miles and if these men didn’t show up, the ones up the road would know I was alive. I was better off dead.
Chapter Thirty-One
The men got back in the car and drove off, with the headlights on now. As soon as the car rounded the curve, I ran into the woods until I was even with the building, then I headed toward it. The undergrowth was thick. A lot of it was Oregon’s killer blackberries that had escaped from cultivation decades ago and have been terrorizing the populace ever since. I kept an arm in front of me but still felt the stinging slap of the vines against my face. They twined around my legs and arms, their big spines catching in my clothes and ripping my skin. The ground was soaked from recent rain and within seconds my shoes were heavy with mud. I felt like I was slogging through wet cement and I was trailing blackberry vines behind me. Anyone witnessing my dash through the woods would have gone to his grave swearing he’d seen Big Foot.
I made good time by eliminating the curves of the road. Car doors slammed just before I reached the clearing. I took cover behind a tree and tried to catch my breath while I disentangled myself from the vines. The last one was a tenacious bastard. By the time I got it off my leg, it had wrapped itself around my arm. I finally stood on one end of it and jerked my arm upward. My sl
eeve ripped but I was free.
I sucked at the worst scratches on my hands while I crouched to peer around the tree. The building was an old two-story house, set in a big clearing of mowed weeds. There were bushes and small trees near the house. Lights were showing at the downstairs windows, most of which were partly open and missing the screens. Curtains billowed from them, pulled outward by a light breeze. The upstairs windows were dark. One of them was shuttered and a long board appeared to be nailed across the shutters. The driving beat of hard rock drifted across the clearing.
Staying back in the trees, I ran to the front of the house. They weren’t worried about security. The front door was standing open. Its old warped screen door was only partly closed. A big window with the drapes open gave me a good view into the living room, which was sparsely furnished in Early American. Several packing boxes were stacked up against one wall. The floor was strewn with open cartons and video and electronic equipment. At the far end of the room was an open archway into a dining room. A dinette set sat beneath a hanging light fixture. On the other side of the table was a door that should lead into the kitchen, a wooden swinging door with a small round window at eye level. I couldn’t see any people in the house.
Three cars were parked in the front yard. I made a snap decision. The chance of me getting a set of keys and getting Nikki and maybe Jessica out of the house was a lot slimmer than the chance of the men getting to the cars and leaving me stranded. I unsheathed the hunting knife and slithered around on my belly, moving from car to car and slashing both rear tires on each one. The night was sibilant with the sound of escaping air.
I peered over the hood of the Buick and checked the house again. No one was in sight. I ran to the far corner of the house. And there was the barn, what was left of it. Part of the roof seemed to be gone and boards were broken at intervals along the side. The big doors leaned open at crazy angles.
I crouched low and ran along the side of the house to the back. The windows were dark on this side. I peered around the back corner. Light was streaming from an open door and a window. An overgrown hedge formed a fence around a small section of the back yard. I crept around behind it until I was even with the door. There was a break in the hedge where a walk made of cement circles led up to the house.
I was looking into an old-fashioned kitchen with painted wooden cupboards and an uneven linoleum floor. The screen door matched the one at the front, old and warped and tattered. The window just to the left of the door was open, its café curtains ruffling in the breeze.
The kitchen was crowded. A man with a full black beard was leaning against the wall next to the swinging door. Next to him, a redhead with glasses and a bad complexion was straddling a chair. I recognized them as the men from the dark car.
Nikki’s jock, in tight white jeans and a black T-shirt stretched across over-developed pectorals, was leaning against the sink, which was to the right of the door. A fourth man had his back to me. He was leaning back against the doorjamb, partially blocking the screen door. He was smoking and after every puff he moved his arm across in front of the door to flick ashes into a brown grocery bag, filled to overflowing with garbage, which was sitting to the left of the door beneath the window.
The fifth person in the room was the fat man. “Gross,” Kimberly had said. “Grotesque” was more like it. The man was a blob, a misshapen pile of human flesh. Short but very big around. Four hundred pounds, minimum. His body was so monstrous that his head seemed several sizes too small. He had tiny piggy eyes and a wet red mouth. A series of chins led down to his swollen chest. He was wearing shapeless black parts and a white shirt, untucked. I couldn’t tell if any of the bulges beneath his clothing was a gun.
The other men were armed. The redhead had a pistol stuck in his waistband. The smoker had a hip holster on the back of his belt. Blackbeard and Nikki’s jock were wearing shoulder holsters. Four armed men, maybe five. Bad odds.
The men weren’t talking but the scene was easy to interpret. The underlings had made their report and were waiting for the head honcho to give them their orders. The fat man tapped a sausage-shaped index finger against his pursed lips for a few moments, then clapped his hands three times as if he were calling a class to attention.
His voice was high-pitched and wheezy. “Here’s what we do,” he said. “We finish packing. Tony’ll be here with the van in a couple hours. We’ll load up and clear out tonight. We’ll take the little cunt down to the dick’s car. Throw some gasoline around and light it up again. It’ll look like he found her and then ran off the road. We’ll take his little faggot friend with us and get rid of him later. Make it look like he picked up the wrong boyfriend. Once we’re out of here, no one can connect us with any of it. The house is in a phony name. We’ll dump the Buick. The other cars are clean.”
“What about Virginia?” Blackbeard asked.
“She’s ready to go. They haven’t tipped to her. The dick was humping her earlier today. They don’t know shit about the set-up.”
The fat man lumbered to the swinging door and pushed through it, his body squeezing through the opening. The other men followed quickly except for the smoker, who lagged behind, taking quick deep drags on his cigarette, flicking ash at the garbage bag. After a final drag, he knocked the live ash off against the rim of the sink. And threw the dead butt into the bag. And left.
The swinging door was still moving on its hinges when I stuck my hand through a hole in the screen and thumbed my lighter. I touched the flame to the edge of the garbage bag and ran back to the hedge.
Within seconds, the paper bag was a column of fire. The curtains above it suddenly turned to a sheet of flame. Bits of burning fabric dropped to the window sill and flames ran quickly along the wood. The garbage bag tipped over, spilling flaming papers past the door to the counter. Layers of old paint on the cupboards bubbled, the wood caught, flames licked upward toward the counter top. The kitchen must have been covered with a quarter-inch-thick layer of old grease. It was going up like a stack of kindling.
I watched my handiwork with a growing sense of panic. I didn’t want to burn the whole house down. I could hear the flames and smell the smoke but the men would be in the living room with a closed door and the dining room separating them from a kitchen that was going to be an inferno in a few more minutes.
I was at the window, planning to smash it with my knife hilt and hope they thought the heat broke it, when the door swung open. The puzzled look on the smoker’s face turned quickly to panic. He shouted over his shoulder and suddenly the kitchen was very full of men fighting a fire. I counted five of them then ran to the front of the house.
At the front steps, I kicked my muddy shoes off and into some bushes, then crossed the porch and entered the house. I wasn’t worried about noise. The radio was blaring and the firefighting was creating quite a commotion. The fat man’s voice was raised nearly to a scream. The smoker was getting a royal chewing-out.
I took a quick look through a set of open French doors to the right. They led into a large room with obvious signs of recent remodeling showing it had once been two smaller rooms. The room was completely empty except for a mattress on a platform base. A prop for dirty movies.
The stairs were also to the right, between the living room and dining room. I stepped over the clutter on the floor and headed up them. There was a landing halfway up where the stairs turned at a right angle. At the top was a hallway that ran the width of the house. A ceiling light on the landing provided enough light for me to see by. At the far end of the hall, a door was standing open. I could see a toilet just inside it.
The rest of the upstairs was divided into four rooms, two on each side. The first door on the left was open. I glanced in, saw it was an empty room and tried the door on the right. It led to a bedroom, plainly furnished, with the occupant’s belongings strewn all over.
I went to the next door on the right. Another bedroom, similarly furnished but with a difference. This one had a gleam of silver on the be
d.
Nikki was facing away from me, his hands tied behind him. His breath was coming in soft sobbing gasps. His shoulders hunched as I approached the bed. I put my hand over his mouth and rolled him toward me as I sat on the bed beside him. His eyes were wide with terror then they filled with tears of relief. I told him to be quiet then sat him up to cut the rope from his wrists.
“They said your car blew up,” he whispered.
“I wasn’t in it.”
Nikki shook the rope from his hands and threw himself at me. I held him for a moment, rocking him gently. Whatever else Nikki was, he was a victimized child at the moment.
“I want to get you out of here,” I whispered. “Do you think you can drop to the ground if I lower you out the window?”
He nodded against my chest. “Go into the woods and stay there. Don’t come back here unless I call you. If you think something’s gone wrong, follow the road down but don’t flag down any cars. They could be headed up here. Try to get to a phone. Call Jefferson Bundy. He’s a detective at the Justice Center. Take your shoes off.”
Nikki let go of me and pulled off the ridiculous silver heels. I rolled them up in blanket. The old sash window opened with little noise. There was no screen. Nikki perched on the sill and we clasped each other’s wrists. I leaned out, lowering him as far as I could without overbalancing. He looked up and nodded and I let go. He dropped to the ground, rolled over, and immediately got to his feet. I tossed the blanket to him and watched until he disappeared into the trees. One down.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I stood in the hall, listening. They were still busy in the kitchen. I tried the door across the hall. The knob turned freely but the door didn’t budge. A dead bolt was set into the wood just above the doorknob.
I went down the hall and into the empty room, closing the door part way. A big window was set into the wall to the right of the door. On the other side of the window was the locked room. It was a bedroom, dimly lit by a nightlight. Nightstands holding lamps flanked a double bed. A bureau stood near the door. An open closet door was on the far wall. The single window above the door was covered with frilly white curtains. Behind them would be a shuttered window with boards nailed across it. Someone was in the bed. All I could see was dark hair above a patchwork quilt.
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