Last Safe Place, The (3 page)

“Just
believe
me,” she said. “A dangerous man is after …” She cut her eyes meaningfully to the boy, “…
us.”

The old man’s protest broke off as clean as a dry stick. “Then let’s git!” He pulled his robe around him and started his peculiar hobble down the hallway leading to the door between the guest house and the garage.

“You’re
not going—” Gabriella began.

“So you gone leave me behind to make nice with Mr. Personality when he find out you not here?” he said over his shoulder without turning around.

Theo was right, of course. He wouldn’t be safe here either.

They all hurried barefoot down the hall with P.D. close on their heels. They had just stepped into the garage when Gabriella heard it. The wind bore it into the guest house through the back door she had left open. It was a cry—savage, guttural, more feral than human. The cry of a beast.

Gabriella was weak with relief when she leapt in behind the steering wheel of her Lincoln Town Car and found the keys dangling in the ignition. The keys to the other two cars in the garage—the Mercedes and the Porsche—were in her purse on the dressing table in her bedroom. She’d been
almost
certain she’d left the keys in the Lincoln, but what if …?

As Theo slammed the back door behind P.D. and Ty and jumped into the passenger seat, she cranked the engine, flipped on the headlights and hit the button for the automatic garage door opener. Yesheb would be able to see the garage door opening from the house. The driveway curved around so the doors faced the back yard. He’d know where she was.

The door seemed to take a hundred years to crank up. Gabriella didn’t wait until it was fully raised. As soon as it was high enough so the top of the car would clear it, Gabriella slammed the transmission into reverse and the big car charged backwards into the driveway. Thunder clattered like heavy boots on wooden stairs; sudden raindrops rattled like volleys of buckshot against the windshield. They were out in the open now, completely exposed. And she could feel his eyes on them, feel his rage. The most dangerous point was now, when she had to stop and put the car in drive, turn around in the oval and head for the street. If he came now …

Yesheb appeared in the rain-freckled glow of headlights. An apparition, a black ghost. She hadn’t seen him coming, he was just there, his face frozen in a mighty contortion of rage, his handsome features so distorted he was hardly recognizable.

She screamed. The hood ornament was centered on his chest like the crosshairs of a rifle and she shoved the gearshift into drive and hit
the accelerator, mashed it all the way to the floorboard. The car leaped at Yesheb.

Gabriella tensed for the impact, the horrible thumping sound he would make as the front grill hit him and threw him backward or under the wheels, or up over the hood and the top of the car.

But the car flew forward into empty air. Yesheb was gone. Had she only imagined he was there? Nobody could move
that
fast! She felt only a little bump, as if the back wheel had run over something small.

As the speeding car careened onto the street, Gabriella glanced in the rearview mirror. For only a moment, she saw him. A hulking shape of deeper darkness in the shadow cast by the garage as lightning torched the night sky. He was hunkered down low, like a lion preparing to spring forward, and she had the irrational fear that he could jump that far, that he could leap off the ground and land on the top of the car or crash through the back window.

And then the driveway with its shadowy figure vanished as they sped down the street. Gabriella thought it odd that all the street lights had double halos around them until she realized she was looking at them through both the water on the windshield and the pools of unshed tears in her eyes. She heard a strange, whining cry, but until Theo patted her leg comfortingly she didn’t realize she was the one making the sound. She ground her teeth together and swallowed the cry and pressed her foot down harder on the accelerator.

Yesheb hadn’t
walked
to her house. He had a vehicle hidden somewhere. Within minutes, he would cleave the night with his rage in mad pursuit.

The hunt was on.

CHAPTER
2

T
HEO REACHED OVER AND PATTED
G
ABRIELLA
’
S LEG WHEN SHE
started to make a whining sound in her throat that sounded like a cat got its tail caught in a lawn mower. The woman was driving through the rain like a bat outta hell and if she got the hysterics she’d ram the car into a tree.

“You doin’ jes fine,” he told her, but he didn’t think she heard him. She was concentrating so hard on watching the road ahead through the windshield and looking in the rearview mirror at the same time that he didn’t say nothing else for fear he’d distract her and then she’d ram the car into a tree for sure.

The odds of the three of them making it to wherever it was Gabriella was high-tailing it to wasn’t looking real good right now, so he best keep his hands to himself and his mouth shut. And pray.

God, could you please keep this poor, scared white woman from killing us all? I’m a old man, gone be standin’ at them pearly gates before long, but the boy here—he got a lot of living to do yet. And Gabriella—she deserve a chance to have a better life than that good-for-nothing son of mine give her. I know you see us and what a fix we in. Any help you got, send it our way. Amen.

Theo shot a glance into the backseat where he could see Ty’s eyes magnified by his glasses, open so wide the whites was glowing like dice that come up snake eyes.

“You got your seatbelt buckled?” he asked.

“Yes sir.” Theo barely caught his whisper.

Gabriella careened around a corner, hydroplaned for a moment then regained control. P.D. clawed at the seat and would have pitched over onto the floorboard if Ty hadn’t grabbed hold of him.

“You hang onto Puppy Dog good and tight, hear.”

Theo didn’t care about the furball on legs, but that boy needed something to hold onto. “We gone be there real soon now.”

Theo had no idea where
there
might be or how far away it was, but if ever was a boy needed reassuring, it was the one with a stranglehold on a golden retriever in the backseat of this car.

Theo was the only one of the three of them who wasn’t afraid. Once you’d done your living, played the parts you’s assigned, wasn’t no reason to be afraid. And scared would wear you out! Life didn’t have nothing to hold over your head when it had done took everything that mattered. Well, except the boy. He was another thing altogether. Much as Theo didn’t want to admit it, Ty was the source of a ball of cold lard that had settled down deep in the pit of Theo’s stomach. If some crazy fool done something to that little boy …

Gabriella made another sliding turn, this time onto Washington Road. They were in Upper St. Clair now, which was a couple of pegs down the pretentiousness ladder from where she and Ty lived in Mt. Lebanon. Now Theo knew where they were going. He’d been to a schmooze-with-the-celebrities party at Bernie Phelps’s house once with Smokey and the band.

Smokey. Theo waited for a stab of pain at the thought of his dead son. He felt absolutely nothing at all.

Only thing Theo remembered about Bernie Phelps was that his squeaky little voice sounded like Joe Pesci and his round, bald head sat on his long skinny neck like a golf ball on a tee. Smokey’d said the man’d been married like eight times and Theo couldn’t figure out how he got even one woman to say yes. Had to be the money. Even though he had gambling debts all over town, Bernie lived like a king at the end of a cul-de-sac on a street lined with huge oak trees. Gabriella screeched to a halt in the driveway that curved in front of the house.

“I’ll go,” Theo told her. “You stay here, leave the engine running in case he not home and we got to keep goin’.”

Theo hobbled fast as he could up the steps to the porch with huge, white pillars and rang the doorbell, holding the button in so it would keep ringing. He wanted to pound on the door with his fists and holler, “Let us in, quick! They’s a crazy man after us!” But he didn’t. Wouldn’t do nobody no good to wake the whole neighborhood.

Seemed like he stood there an hour before he saw a sudden puddle of light on the lawn shining out through the rain from an upstairs window. Then the hall light glowed through the stained glass panels on both sides of
the door. An eyeball appeared at the peephole and Theo heard the deadbolt snap free. Bernie opened the door but hid behind it like a woman got caught in her nightgown by the UPS man.

The Barney-Fife-nervous little man’s whole face was a question mark. “What …?”

Theo didn’t answer, just turned and motioned for the others, urging them on with a stage-whispered, “Hurry up!” Gabriella, Ty and P.D. rushed up the steps and scuttled past Bernie and into the house. Gabriella slammed the door behind them and leaned against it, panting and half sobbing.

“What …?” Bernie tried again.

Gabriella ignored him.

“Theo,” she gasped. “There’s a phone on the table at the end of the couch in there.” She pointed into the darkened study. “Call the—”

“The law, yeah, I know.”

Before he hobbled out of the entryway, Theo took off his robe and wrapped it around Gabriella’s shoulders. She looked surprised, then grateful. Standing there shivering in the bright light in that wet cotton nightgown, she looked like the winner of a wet t-shirt contest. She needed something to cover herself and Bernie wasn’t falling all over himself to help her out.

“What are you doing here?” Bernie’s voice sounded like he’d just inhaled helium.

“Running for our lives,” Gabriella told him.

“I got you a new security system. The thing cost more than the gross national product of most Third World countries.”

“Fat lot of good it done if anybody with opposable thumbs can disarm it,” Theo said. “Where’s the dad-gum light switch?”

“Theo, please,” Gabriella said. “Hurry!”

“This
is
hurryin’.” He felt around on the wall, mumbling under his breath, “I move fast for a old man. If I’s gone live long enough for a walker, I’d need one with a airbag.” He found the light switch, then the phone and punched in 911.

Gabriella turned to Bernie. “Have you got a gun?”

“What?”

“A gun in the house?”

“No.”

“A hunting knife, an ax, anything?”

“Of course not!”

“Then you better hope the police get here before he does.”

“He who?”

“Who do you think—Yesheb. He broke into the house! And you wouldn’t believe me that he was dangerous.”

Theo put his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and spit at Bernie, “You ain’t ’xactly doing a bang-up job looking after Gabriella—you know that, don’t you? And without her, how you figure to finance all them alimony payments?”

A female voice spoke into Theo’s ear. “Alimony payments? This is the 911 dispatch. Do you have an emerg—?”

“Yes, I got an emergency!” Theo turned his attention back to the phone in his hand. “We in Upper St. Clair and you need to send the po-lice ’fore that maniac shows up and kills us all.” The Upper St. Clair part’d build a fire under them. Tell the law you was in the Hill District or Homewood Brushton and they wouldn’t show up ’til the dead bodies started to stink.

Gabriella rushed over and yanked the receiver out of his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m calling from 2811 Ft. Couch Road. My son and I and my father-in-law came here, ran here because a man broke into my house and …” He saw her fire a glance at Ty and edit whatever she was planning to say. “… and now he’s after us.”

She answered a couple more questions, then hung up. Bernie was babbling but didn’t make no sense, something about selling Gabriella’s new book. Making money was the only thing Theo’d ever heard him talk about. Theo and Gabriella both ignored him.

Soon as she hung up the phone, Gabriella shoved her arms into the sleeves of Theo’s robe and pulled the belt tight round her waist. Her eyes swept the room—the dark corners, the doors, the windows—like a prison searchlight. Her gaze passed over Ty and then yanked back to him. The boy was on his knees on the cold tile floor with his arm around P.D. His eyes were still huge, his face pale. She crossed to him and got down on one knee in front of him.

“Hey champ,” she said. Her voice was trembly, but she got control of it. “You okay?” She reached out and ruffled his black curls. Theo figured Ty hated that. Most boys did at that age, but tonight, he leaned into her. It was clear Gabriella’d done somethin’ to bring a world of hurt down around
both they heads. Theo didn’t know what it was but he was certain she hadn’t meant to put that boy in danger.

“Who was that man, the one we almost ran over?” Ty asked. “Is he the same man we saw at the park and at the grocery store and in Florida? The one who’s always sending you black roses?”

Gabriella nodded.

“Did he hurt you?”

The boy pushed the big, round glasses up on his nose, was all the time doing that—more often when he was upset. But he didn’t need those big glasses to see the blood on his mother’s ear and soaked white nightgown.

“Actually, I hurt myself. Got hung up when I was trying to get away from him.”

Theo didn’t believe that for a minute.

Gabriella pulled Ty into her arms, held him tight against her. “The man you saw is crazy, that’s all. Crazy people do crazy things. But we’re fine now, Sweetheart. We’re safe here.”

Theo didn’t believe that either. From the look on her face, neither did Gabriella.

T
Y DIDN
’
T BELIEVE
a word his mother said. They weren’t fine and they weren’t safe—here or anywhere else. He was certain they weren’t because he knew what none of the rest of them did. He knew
why
the man in black was after them. He also knew the man wasn’t after
them
at all. He was only after Ty.

The boy felt cold, a freezing in his veins like crystals forming in the little river of water that flowed across the roof tile outside his window. He’d watched it happen last winter, fascinated by how the cold could turn the clear water milky, sluggish and then still and dead.