A Killer in the Wind (19 page)

“Count the minutes till it begins, Champion. That’s all there are now. Minutes. Hours maybe. Not even a full day till it begins. And once it begins, it will go on and on and on. Like hell, a hell on earth. I made a promise to my brother’s soul. Hell won’t be the half of it.”

Fear set a red burst of rage off inside me. I nearly choked on the words as they sputtered out. “You better hope you get to me, you son of a bitch. You better hope you get to me before I get to you.”

But nothing came back except that laugh again. That awful sound. Then silence. He was gone.

Still holding the phone to my ear, I leaned my head against the wall. Then I slowly lowered the phone, lowered my trembling hand to my side. My scalp was clammy with sweat. The back of my shirt stuck to me, damp. I still couldn’t swallow. Mouth too dry. Throat too thick.

A team of killers after me with orders to bring me alive to that skull-headed monster. And him set on torturing me forever and ever. Not a pleasant situation. Hard to see the sunny side of it.

“All right,” I murmured aloud. “Keep it together.”

I straightened with a breath, stiffened my back with a breath. Slipped the phone into my pocket with one hand, still holding my Glock with the other, feeling the pebbled butt of the gun against my sweating palm.

I had to get away from this place. Somewhere safe where I could think. The crazy killer’s threats were repeating themselves in my mind, as mocking and insistent as a bully’s schoolyard taunts.
An agony beyond anything imaginable forever
. . .
hell won’t be the half of it
. . .
count the minutes till it begins
. . . I could barely think with all that interior noise, could hardly consider what I’d found here—what the Starks or their employer had been looking for, but only I had found.

Samantha Pryor—whoever the hell she was—had been onto the Fat Woman. That had to be it. She had known it was Aunt Jane who’d been supplying Martin Emory, selling him the children he’d buried in the woods. What else had Samantha known? What else was in that sheaf of papers? Who was she, for Christ’s sake? Just a librarian?

I took one last glance around the shambles of the apartment. Then I turned to the door, holding my gun low, keeping it pressed against my pants leg. I unlocked the door and began to draw it open.

Suddenly, the door was kicked in, throwing me back. A giant of a man charged into the apartment as I staggered. He was massive—towering—massive in the middle, broad in the shoulders. Muscles stuffed into his jeans and baseball jacket. He was young, in his twenties, with styled, sandy hair and a sandy goatee. Nothing in his expression but businesslike professionalism as in one swift, unbroken motion, he pushed the door shut behind him and came at me.

I tried to bring the gun to bear. He was too fast. He was on me. Grabbed my arm with his left, brought his right up into my center. I never saw the Taser. I just felt the blast. My body went rigid, a tremor of muscle-clenching pain fanning out from the gun through all of me in a flash. The thug held the weapon against me and went on holding it. Then he snapped it off, pulled it back, and let me fall.

I collapsed into myself and crumpled down, dropped to the floor like a dead weight. I heard a curse come out of me without my even thinking to curse. What I was thinking was:
Hold on to the gun
. I tried, but I couldn’t. My spasming hand wouldn’t respond to my brain. The Glock dropped from my slack fingers as I toppled down.

I lay on the floor now, still clenched and shuddering. Unable to move but fully conscious. I could see the big thug swooping down to snap up my Glock. I could see him stick the gun into his belt. Then, trembling, helpless, I watched him unzip his baseball jacket. He had a T-shirt on beneath, his muscles bulging through it. With another quick, calm, professional motion, he pulled a roll of canvas from an inside pocket, tossed it onto the floor next to me. I saw it start to unroll. A canvas sack. I knew he was going to stuff me in there.

Now—still swift, still calm—he unzipped another pocket. Brought a leather pouch out of it. Opened the pouch, fished inside it with his fingers.

Terror wildfired through me as I lay watching him bring out a syringe.

An agony beyond anything imaginable forever
. . .
hell won’t be the half of it
. . .

I had to move. I had to move but I couldn’t. I fought for control of my body but it was a thing apart, a shivering, unresponsive corpse with me trapped inside.

The thug held the syringe needle up and pushed the plunger just enough to clear the air from the canister. All the while his demeanor was bland, blank, serious, professional.

I let out a strangled noise through my frozen jaws as he dropped down onto one knee beside me.

Count the minutes till it begins, Champion.

I had to move. Had to fight. Had to get away or Stark would have me.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move.

The thug plunged the syringe’s needle into my neck. I was thinking,
No, no, no!
as I lost consciousness.

8

The Road to Hell

I
STARTED TO WAKE
slowly and then the memory of what had happened came back to me and the terror came back to me and I jolted awake fast.

I was in total darkness. I didn’t know how long I’d been under. I found I had control of my muscles again, but I still couldn’t move, I could only struggle. My hands were pinioned behind me. I was in a close space and couldn’t extend my legs. I thrashed for a second in blind panic, trying to tear my way free by main strength. Then I stopped. Lay sweating and breathless, my heart pounding. I fought to keep still, to take stock.

My gut burned from the Taser. My neck ached from the shot. My mind was still slow and sluggish from whatever the thug had drugged me with. The effect got worse as the adrenaline of panic seeped away. I began to feel like a great, strong hand was wrapped around me, trying to drag me back down into unconsciousness. My eyes began to flutter shut . . .

But that voice—Stark’s hash rasping skeleton voice was alive in my mind again.
Hell won’t be the half of it
. . .
count the minutes till it begins
. . . And that laugh: a sound like a snake slithering and rattling inside my head. Fear and desperation rose up in me again and overcame everything—the sluggishness, the pain . . . everything. I forced myself to think. I had to get free. I had to get free before it was too late. If it wasn’t too late already.

I took two long deliberate breaths to fight down the panic, to slow my racing thoughts and clear my head. Where was I? Inside the trunk of a car. Yes, I could feel the motion, hear the noise of the engine, the noise of other cars passing outside. I was on a highway. Traveling somewhere. Traveling to Stark. Traveling to hell.

Two more deep breaths.
Don’t panic. Fight the panic
.

My hands—what about my hands? Handcuffs? No. Twisting my fingers around, I could feel the extended plastic tab of a nylon zip-tie pulled tight around my wrists.

I drew another breath. It wasn’t easy. There wasn’t enough air in here. The air was hot and close. Not a lot of room to move, either. Like being in a coffin—which added to the frenzy of dread inside me. At least I wasn’t inside that canvas sack. That was something anyway.

I shifted my body so that my fingertips could brush the bottom of the trunk, so I could get a sense of my surroundings. The trunk was carpeted. Empty too, as far as I could make out—kicking around with my feet, turning my body. Nothing in here but me.

All right, at least I was thinking now. Empty trunk. Locked. Me inside, hands tied up. What do you do? It’s no simple thing to open a car trunk from the inside. That’s why new cars sometimes have emergency tabs in them: phosphorescent plastic pull-tabs you can see in the dark so you can grab them and pop the trunk open if you get trapped somehow. If I could find a tab, maybe I could pull it . . .

I twisted around some more. Every motion brought back to me how restricted I was. Stuffed in that small space, my hands bound. Every time I tried to move I had to breathe down another fresh gout of panic.

Still—grunting, straining—I managed to twine my body over far enough so that I could get a broad look at the darkness surrounding me. No phosphorescent tab that I could see. No simple way to get the trunk open.

The failure brought a fresh wash of sweat down the front of my face. I had to blink the sting of it out of my eyes. But I forced myself not to go crazy over it. Just a setback, that’s all. You had to keep trying, right? You had to go on thinking: There was no emergency tab, so what else could I find in the trunk of a car? What else?

Tools.

The idea lit a faint glow of hope in me. If I could find something—anything—to use as a saw or a lever, I might be able to break through the zip-tie, free my hands, give myself at least a fighting chance when Stark and his thugs came to get me. Even a sharp edge somewhere might help me cut through the plastic.

The hope glowed—and then the glow dimmed almost to nothing. In a lot of trunks, the tools for changing tires are kept with the tire beneath the trunk floor. No way for me to lift the trunk floor while I was lying on top of it as I was.

In some cars though, it’s different . . .

I began to shuffle and hump my body across the small space. It was hard. Hard. Moving first one half of me, then the other, like a snake. I writhed to one side of the trunk. Got myself in a position where I could run my fingers over the trunk wall.

I felt nothing there. Just more of the same, more of the smooth carpeting. No sharp edges—not a one. Had to move up a little. Every inch a strain. The sweat pouring out of me, the breath breaking from me in little grunts and gasps. But now—yes—my fingertips brushed over a ridge in the surface. What was it? Something. My eyes filled with tears of frustration as I tried to work my restricted fingers under the edge of it, tried to test if there was a break there, something that could be pulled away from the rest.

Then something budged. Just a little. I felt a break in the carpet. One fingernail—one sliver of one fingernail—worked its way under the ridge in the trunk wall. I worked to get a better grip.

Please, God,
I prayed. Squeezing my eyes shut so that the tears fell from them, mixing with the sweat.

The car hit a bump. My fingernail slipped out of the ridge.

I let out a broken cry of frustration. I could’ve sworn I heard Stark’s skeletal laugh.
Count the minutes till it begins, Champion
. . .

With a growl, I hurried to twist back into position. To find the ridge, to get my fingernail back under it. There it was. I wedged the nail in. Curled my finger. I felt the ridge shift, pulling away from the rest of the wall.

Please
. . .

Now I could work my fingers into the space. Now I could pull again. A piece of the wall came loose. The space widened. I struggled to shift my body. Worked my hands in deeper. Pulled again.

A small square section of the wall fell free. I felt as if my heart was about to leap out of my chest. What was it? What had I pulled out? I couldn’t turn to look. I wouldn’t have been able to see it in the dark anyway. But I prayed I had opened the tool compartment. It had to be. It had to.

Before I could find out, the motion around me changed. I felt the car turn. I felt it slow. I lay very still, trying to hear over the noise of my hammering heart, trying to get a sense of what was happening in the big, free world outside this smothering darkness.

The car was leaving the highway. It slowed some more. It rolled to a stop. My breathing stopped as well. Had we reached our destination? No, not so close to the exit ramp. We’d just stopped for a moment. A stop sign at the end of the ramp—that had to be it. But maybe the driver had left the highway because he heard me moving back here. Maybe he was going to come back around to check on me. Maybe he’d see that I’d worked the tool compartment open and hit me with the Taser or the syringe again, or maybe . . .

No. The car started up. Moving now on a slower road. A local road.

I licked my dry lips.
We must be getting close,
I thought.
Nearing our destination. Where Stark was waiting for me
. . . I felt my heart, my hopes sinking. Not much time left.

But some time. Some.

I opened my mouth wide and pulled as deep a breath as I could. Prying the cover off the wall compartment had given me some hope. Now the sense that time was running out gave me fresh urgency. I needed the energy from both. The muscles in my shoulders were strained and burning, sore from the effort of moving my fingers with my wrists bound behind me. Every movement in that coffin of a place made me draw my lips back, bare my teeth in pain. Only hope, and the fear of what was coming—what was coming fast, coming soon—pushed me on, mind against body, mind forcing the body to try again.