“I need to remove your gag.”
Again, she notes the distinct absence of emotion in his voice. He either lacks the deranged convictions of the last two killers she took down—one of them fatally—or he’s a devoted practitioner of his own maxim: silence equals strength.
To signal consent—as if such a concept can exist in this moment—she opens her mouth so wide she feels air on her gums, hoping he can see her teeth clenched around the gag. Without touching her lips or face, he grabs the gag and tugs. It’s a smooth, practiced gesture, but her throat still spasms when the tendril-like extension leaves. Hot saliva slicks her bottom lip and those few parts of her chin that aren’t covered by the mask’s leather straps. Her coughs are so strong they cause her to buck against the restraints that tie her to the gurney. Once they stop and she relaxes again, she feels him carefully wiping the spit from her jaw.
She’s rehearsed this part. She just thought she’d have to do it sooner.
“Please,” she whispers, “please . . . my parents have money.”
“Your parents don’t have money.” He sounds bored.
“They do, promise. I . . . please, I won’t say anything. You can just let me go and I won’t tell anyone. It’s true. I won’t tell, I won’t.” When her tears dampen the cloth covering her eyes, she realizes her performance is so good she’s convinced herself. “Just tell me what you want.”
He grabs her jaw with sudden force unlike any he’s shown so far. “Your silence,” he growls. “What I want is your silence.”
He releases her jaw. Then she assumes he’s rooting through a pile of tools, but the sounds he’s making are a plastic-sounding clatter—not the clinking of metal on metal you’d expect. A few seconds later, he grabs her chin, squeezing until she opens her mouth. Braced for the nausea-inducing violation of another gag, the first thing she notices is the different taste—less like pungent rubber, more like bland plastic. It’s forcing her mouth open wider than before, but when it stops short of the back of her throat, relief washes through her, holding Zypraxon at bay once more.
She’s surprised when he starts to untie her wrists from the leather straps that have secured them to the gurney during her confinement. But just as quickly, he ties each one to something else, and whatever cable or rope he’s using puts tension on both wrists. When he’s done, she realizes the taut cables suspend her wrists at her waist, but about two feet off the gurney.
“Don’t move,” he says quietly, but he sounds distracted. Maybe because he’s still working. There’s another plastic clatter similar to the first, this one accompanied by what sounds like small wheels, smaller than the gurney’s, rolling across the cargo bay’s metal floor. He’s putting something into place, she realizes. The plastic tube inside of her mouth starts to wiggle. The top end of it is being repositioned. Then the tube goes suddenly still, indicating it’s been fitted inside something above her head.
“It’s time to take your blindfold off,” he says. “No matter what you see, no matter what happens, you have to stay quiet. And you can’t move. I’ll explain why, but first I need you to agree by grunting once.”
She grunts once, and he pushes the hood’s fabric up onto her forehead again.
The truck’s cargo bay is illuminated by those soft blue lights you stick on walls and press once to make them light up like cracked glow sticks. It gives a vaguely nightclub-style glow to what he’s done to her, maybe because the contraption she’s been attached to is made almost entirely of transparent Lucite. The tube wedged inside her mouth extends up into a large transparent cube about three feet above her head. The cube is supported by metal legs that extend to the floor on either side of the gurney. The cords on her wrists are secured above her head to a Lucite panel that divides the cube horizontally and extends out from either side. After a few seconds of blinking madly, she can see the horizontal divider is actually two pieces that fit snugly around the open end of the tube, creating two spaces inside the cube: a top half that’s exposed to the tube’s open end and a bottom half that’s shielded from it. Finally, the cables make sense. If she moves her hands in the slightest, she might pull the divider inside the container apart, exposing the tube’s open end to the lower compartment.
It’s not just a cube, she realizes, it’s some sort of container, and it’s empty. For now.
This isn’t just about silencing her. It’s just as she feared. The ride itself is going to be a form of torture.
Cyrus Mattingly stares down at her dispassionately. He’s lost his baseball cap, and his hair’s a thick mane brushed back from his broad forehead. She stares back, hoping Kansas Command is devouring and analyzing every image her TruGlass lenses are capturing of this monster. So occupied is she by this hope, she’s afraid for a moment that she forgot to affect the necessary level of quivering fear.
“Whatever’s in here,” Mattingly says, tapping the side of the empty container, “you don’t want to get in here”—he taps the side of the tube extending into her mouth. “You do that in two ways. You stay quiet, and you stay still. Whatever you do, don’t move these.” He taps one of her wrists.
Rage keeps the panic at bay. Rage for all the other women, and maybe some men, who endured these cold instructions and the terror of finding themselves trapped in this instrument of transparent torture.
“Your anger doesn’t make you strong, Hailey Brinkmann. You don’t know what bravery is. Not yet. But you’ll learn tonight. So long as you look deep within yourself and find whatever it takes to stay very quiet and very still.”
An accordion room divider cuts off this section of the cargo bay from the rest of the truck. Other than the gurney and the terrible contraption she’s attached to, there’s not much else here. When he turns his back to her, for the first time she sees three wooden crates stacked against the wall a few feet away. They’re lined with air holes along the tops of the sides facing her.
Mattingly removes the lid from the Lucite container, sticks a rubber plug in the tube’s opening, then unties the top of the cable attached to her right wrist from where it’s secured to the divider. He lays the lax cable across her lap so he can slide one half of the divider free from the cube. If she were an ordinary victim, this would be the time to fight back, even at the risk of choking herself on the tube. But for her, it’s not time to fight back. Not yet. Not until they’ve reached their destination. If she takes him down now, he’s just a kidnapper with a fetish for Lucite. When they reach his kill site, she’ll have the chance to overpower him, leaving him half-alive and surrounded by the evidence of his other murders before law enforcement arrives.
Mattingly turns to the stack of ventilated crates and picks up the top one by its handle. He tilts one end down into the Lucite container, then pulls up on a vertical gate. The crate’s inhabitants stream down into the Lucite container in such a frenzied rush, it’s hard to tell what they are. They’re gray and they’re panicked—that’s all she can see at first. He sets the crate aside, then slides the divider back into the container so both halves are firmly enclosing the tube’s shaft again, trapping the wriggling creatures in the bottom half. Then he reties the cable around her right wrist to the divider. He removes the plug from the tube’s mouth in the top half, snaps the container’s lid back into place, and gives her time to stare up at the writhing mass of rats, some of which might come crawling down the tube and into her mouth if she panics or makes the wrong move or does anything to disrupt the construction of his hideous invention.
He looks at her only briefly. He’s not savoring the sight of her terror. Not in this particular moment, at least. He’s a sadist, for sure. But for now, this seems like just another procedure in his workday.
Because it’s preparatory, she realizes. Awful as it is, this isn’t the main event.
Then she sees the tiny black camera affixed to the truck’s wall. Maybe he’ll savor the sight of her fear in private. Or maybe he just wants to keep an eye on her while he drives.
He steps behind the
accordion divider and pulls it closed, separating the scene of her degradation from whatever else is inside this box truck. Leaving her alone with her racing heartbeat, alone with the lyrics of “Angel of the Morning,” alone with the rats writhing in the center of her vision. The creatures have settled into something that looks like a contained, gently swelling sea. While somewhat less frenzied, it still pulses with a collective desire to break free.
She closes her eyes and sucks the deepest breath she can through her nostrils.
Then the truck starts moving beneath her, and she realizes they’re finally on their way.
10
Lebanon, Kansas
Eighteen hours. That’s how long Mattingly kept Charlotte in that damned storm cellar.
Everything following her placement in the truck has been a horror show, for sure. But the long wait for some beam of light to pierce the endless dark coming through Charley’s TruGlass was its own special agony, and as crazy as it would sound to someone who hasn’t seen the things he has these past few years, Cole’s relieved they’re finally moving on to the next phase of this nightmare.
When the surveillance cameras showed the bastard actually going to bed, Cole tried to do the same. That’s when he had Scott Durham break the news to Noah that he was to be placed under armed guard in his bedroom whenever Cole tried to get some rest. And, no, it didn’t matter if he wasn’t tired. The not-so-good doctor accepted the arrangement with an eye roll, but that was it. Meanwhile in the bunker below them, the techs rotated monitoring shifts, which gave Luke the chance to catch as much shut-eye as he could inside the cozy confines of his armored Cadillac.
Then, right at the moment when Mattingly started his truck and descended into the storm cellar for the first time since he’d left Charlotte there, Durham called everyone at Kansas Command back on deck and sent word to The Consortium.
When Cole looks over his shoulder now, he sees Noah’s sitting forward in his chair, staring at the screen, a slight dimple in his chin, the muscles flexing in his jaw, eyes bright and unblinking—it’s the expression he’d get after another early test subject tore themselves to pieces. It’s what he looks like when his battle against real fear is partially successful.
And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Charley’s mother, Noah’s mother; they’re different women, but they both died in the same dark cellar at the hands of Daniel and Abigail Banning. It has to be getting to him. Still, Noah’s never experienced a disturbing emotion he couldn’t swiftly exorcise by way of a diabolical conspiracy. But there’s something in the man’s expression Cole can’t quite read. A muffled form of pain, he’s sure of it.
“Too much?” Cole tries for parental sympathy, but the question sounds condescending nonetheless.
“I’m sorry?” Noah asks, looking straight at him now, his nostrils flaring.
“Watching this part. Is it too much for you . . . Your mother?”
“You knew all this was in the truck?” he asks.
No insult or smart remark, Cole notes. That’s as good as an admission.
“I did, and she didn’t want to know. She wanted to experience the truck organically. Those were her exact words.”
“I can’t decide if all this means the ride is more important than the destination or vice versa.”
“Focus on Charlotte, not Mattingly.”
“As long as she’s in that truck, it’s the same thing. That . . . thing is designed to break her, and since we’ve got no idea how long she’ll be in it, I’m afraid he might succeed.”
“Nobody can break Charlotte Rowe.”
“I’m talking about her mind, Cole.”
“Rats weren’t one of the phobias she listed during her intake.”
“Forget the rats. The device isn’t working in isolation. He prepped her with fourteen hours in that storm cellar. In that . . . darkness. You asked me for my analysis of her, so take it. If there’s one thing that haunts her every waking moment, it’s the amount of time her mother spent in that root cellar on the Bannings’ farm.”
“So, she triggers before they reach their destination,” Cole responds. “Then she and Luke take the guy down roadside and we collect the pieces. Not optimal, but we’ll manage.”
“That isn’t the worst that could happen.”
“OK. What’s the worst that could—”
“She’s headed into the middle of some sort of operation we don’t understand, and all she’s got with her is her boyfriend in some fancy car.”
“I told you, we can get anywhere she is in three hours, max.”
“A lot can go wrong in three hours.”
“Maybe, but in the presence of a suitable trigger event, Zypraxon has never failed us.”
Scott Durham’s standing directly under a screen transmitting an angle on everything that’s piled on the other side of the accordion panel from where Charley’s been confined.
“Thoughts, Mr. Durham?” Cole asks.
“Is he going to make deliveries?” Scott asks. “While he’s got her back there? I mean, there’s a flat screen. Bags of books. Clothes still in department store bags, it looks like.”
“None of it’s sorted or packaged,” Noah says. “The guy’s not doing business while he’s got Charley tied up in back. And why would he buy his own truck for that?”
“He makes the deliveries once he’s done with her?” Durham says, sounding suddenly less sure of himself. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s black market stuff.”
“He’s selling black market items and he hasn’t corresponded with anyone about drop-off and delivery before now?” Noah asks.
“He bought all that stuff himself, guys,” Cole says. “We have records.”
On an exterior cam angled at Mattingly’s property, Cole can see the barn doors opening, allowing the box truck’s headlights to cut twin swaths across the flat lawns leading to the nearest road. The local time in Dallas is 8:00 p.m.
“Make sure Luke’s ready to tail,” Cole says.
“Already did,” Shannon Tran responds.
“OK. Mattingly’s hit the road at exactly eight p.m. Based on that, we’re going to assume he wants most of this drive to take place while Texas sleeps. What I need is for someone to animate a map for me that basically highlights the entire ground area he could reasonably cover before sunrise. In any direction. I need it to take in time changes if he suddenly tacks east or west, and I need the highlighted area to move with him as he moves. Tell me now if I need to explain that again.”
“You don’t,” Tim Zadan says. “I’m on it.”
Cole’s pretty sure he knows exactly where they’re headed, thanks to the Amarillo postmark on Mattingly’s letter. He feels guiltier about creating the extra work for Tim than he does for keeping the letter a secret from his business partners, which says a lot about his feelings toward The Consortium at present.
Noah’s next to him so suddenly, Cole jumps, which makes Noah smile. “This is fun. You should bring me in on these things more often.”
Bullshit, Cole thinks. Don’t distract me with a smile, Mr. Turlington. It won’t work.
Noah’s still rattled by the hours Charley’s spending in confinement, for sure, and that’s good. Even though Cole’s managing several different agendas this evening, finding out if Noah has a heart is one of the more important ones.
11
Highway 287
The traffic’s thinned out, leaving Luke all by his lonesome while he follows Mattingly’s truck in the highway’s northwest-bound lanes.
With a press of a button on the center console, he transforms his view of the road ahead into something resembling a vast undersea landscape. The transition’s so jarring, an untrained driver might careen nose-first into the nearest guardrail. But after months of practice, Dark Mode, as the techs call it, has become Luke’s favorite special feature on an SUV with many.
Personally, Luke prefers to call it Cloak Mode since the process blacks out all of the Escalade’s windows with previously hidden tinting that
blooms ink-blot style if you’re watching the process unfold from outside. Which you shouldn’t be. The feature’s only designed to be used at night and during a close pursuit. On the inside, the windshield and windows transform into opaque computer screens transmitting hyperbrilliant views of the surrounding landscape streamed from exterior night vision cameras lining the Escalade’s exterior. Guardrails, other vehicles, the occasional tufts of brush beside the flat prairie highway—they’re all defined by a seemingly infinite spectrum of blues and greens that give them a dazzling texture. Even lane markers, which typically require reflected light to be seen, are clearly visible.
Simultaneously, every light source inside the SUV dims to nearly imperceptible levels so as not to reflect off any of the critical displays. That means no using the GPS screen manually, which is fine because he’s only supposed to use this mode when he’s trying to follow someone closely. The system works in conjunction with the reflection-deterrent paint covering the Escalade’s exterior; paint so gritty it feels almost like shark’s skin to the touch, but that’s how it reduces the amount of light that can bounce off it.
In other words, with the press of a button, Luke can turn his SUV into something that can be hard to spot on city streets after dark and nearly impossible to make out on a vast stretch of empty highway at night. Which is exactly where he is now.
But processing all of this new visual information, not being startled by an animal’s watching eyes from the brush beside the road or a dozen other potential distractions he might never see with his naked eye, required extensive training.
In the event of distraction, electronic sensors give off soft chimes if Luke veers too close to any sort of obstruction. Learning how to drive by those took practice as well. His eyes still need time to adjust to the windshield change, and during just that brief period, he has to drive by sound, not sight. This part seemed simple enough when they first explained it; then he took a spin in the thing and realized the extent to which his reflexive reactions behind the wheel were inextricably tied to his eyes, not his ears.
Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Page 10