Run the Risk (33 page)

I looked over at Chavez, who was kneeling next to Baker. He looked up, then got to his feet. I nodded.

“Start her.”

He gave James her instructions. I took a breath and tightened my fingers around my Glock.

“I'm walking.”

I stepped onto the carpet of the dining room and glanced back into the kitchen. Chavez was staring at the blue flame of the burner.

“There's something I want you to hear,” Gabriel said.

“What?”

“I want you to hear your daughter die.”

“No.”

“Run.”

I turned to Chavez, who was reaching out to turn off the burner.

“Tell James,” I said urgently.

He turned off the burner and the blue flame disappeared with a clicking sound.

“Faster,” Gabriel said. “Faster.”

As I started into the living room, Chavez began to follow, then turned and looked back toward the stove as if he had heard something. Harrison started to raise his hand and then shake his head. From down the hallway I heard a cry of pain.

“No, Mom,” Lacy screamed.

Harrison started to move back toward Chavez, gesturing with his hand, shaking his head. “No, no no.”

“Oh, God,” Chavez said in surprise.

He turned and looked at me. Then the kitchen disappeared in the flash of an explosion that swallowed him up in its brilliant white light. Harrison was in the air, tumbling backward over the dining room chairs. Instinctively, I started to turn as blue fingers of burning natural gas reached out across the room and touched my face like a warm Santa Ana wind, burning into my eyes as if I had stared unprotected at the sun. The only sound I heard was dishes falling out of the cupboards and breaking on the floor like a hard rain.

I dropped the phone and reached for the motion detector on my chest to protect it from the flying debris, but by then it was over. I could hear Harrison on the floor, tangled up in upturned chairs, moving as if caught in a spiderweb. A fine dust was drifting out from the kitchen and covering everything like a snowfall. I was on my knees, though I didn't remember falling. I looked down at the motion detector on my vest, but all I could see in the center of my vision was a dull, round disk of faint light, as if a heavy gauze had been put over my eyes. There was no detail. I couldn't see the motion detector. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. On the edges of my vision, I could make out dull shapes and colors, but the center . . . there was no center, just dull gray light.

I touched the glass of the motion detector and my fingers caught on the uneven edge of a crack. I waited for another flash of ignition and a rush into oblivion, but it didn't come. A trickle of moisture slid down my cheek, and I reached up to find blood draining from my ear that was facing the blast.

I looked toward where I had seen Harrison tangled in the chairs.

“I can't see,” I said, though I couldn't even hear my own words.

If Harrison responded, I didn't hear it.

I pulled myself to my feet, then turned and looked down the hallway leading to the bedrooms. It had the appearance of a cave descending into the earth. All I could see was a circle of darkness with a halo of faint light around it.

Something moved in the darkness.

“I'll fire,” I yelled, raising my Glock.

The darkness seemed to pulsate, but nothing moved out from it.

I tried to picture the hallway from memory. A dozen steps. I took a step. My legs started to buckle, then stiffened and held. The gun felt impossibly heavy, and my hand began to tremble as I tried to point it into the blackness ahead.

One step, then another. My foot slipped on a piece of debris on the floor and the weight of the vest on my shoulders began to pull me over until I regained my balance.

I gripped the gun with both hands and worked my way along the wall, staring into the blackness.

A breath, then another.

I stepped up to the bathroom door and pushed it open. On the edges of my vision, the faint shape of the pale yellow shower curtain hung as if suspended in air. I swung the gun back and forth, my free hand groping into the blank space in the center of my vision.

The room was empty.

I turned and raised my Glock toward Lacy's room. At the bottom of my vision I could just make out a dull line of light at the base of the door. The faint blue flicker of a TV inside the room, maybe. I reached out until my hand found the handle, then I flung the door open with as much force as I could gather. The dull glow of the TV appeared to sit in the center of the room. I swung the gun back and forth trying to focus on the edges of my sight. Nothing moved. There was no sound, though I didn't know if that was because I couldn't hear anything or because there was nothing there. I took a step and my foot tangled up in something on the floor. My heart began to race.

“Lacy,” I whispered. I knelt straight down so as to not change the angle inside the motion detector on the vest and reached out until I touched it. Taffeta. It was her dress from the pageant. I started to gather it up in my hand as if I could protect her by gathering up all her things then I stopped and let it slip from my hand.

I backed out and moved toward my bedroom door at the end of the hall. The walls on the right were covered with family pictures. I counted them with one hand as I held the gun with the other, each step taking me further back into family history. The blood from my ear ran down my chin and dripped onto my shirt. Sweat filled with tiny particles of dust from the explosion fell, stinging my eyes. The hallway appeared to fall away from me, tumbling into complete blackness.

I reached out my hand to find the door, but it vanished into the darkness as if it had been severed. I pressed my back against the wall and tried to wipe the sweat and dust from my eyes, but it did no good.

Breathe. Take a breath, then move.

I could feel the frame of a picture against my back. I knew from its shape that it was a picture of Lacy as a child, sitting atop her father's shoulders.

I heard the sound of my heart beating like the pounding of a fist against a wall. I reached up to the motion detector and felt the vibration of my heart beating through it like a lit fuse.

“I'm still here, you son of a bitch,” I whispered.

In the darkness something seemed to pass inches from my face. I swept my gun across the darkness. It was like passing it through ink. Nothing was there.

I groped along the wall until my hand found the door frame, and then the handle. How much time had passed? Thirty seconds? A minute? Too much.

In one motion I turned the handle and threw myself at the darkness in front of me. The door flew open and a faint sheet of light rushed at me. The bedroom was little more than a pale field of gray with a corona of light around the edges. I swept the room with my Glock, searching for a hint of movement or color, anything that would give away Gabriel's position.

“Lacy!” I shouted.

I heard a voice and swung to my right. The blurry glow of the TV floated in the air several feet away.

“Lacy, where are you?”

A muffled cry rose from behind me. I turned and moved toward the sound, stretching my hand out to find what my eyes couldn't. I took a step, and then another, but my hand found nothing.

“Lacy, make a sound if you can.”

A barely audible shriek tried to escape its gag.

“Lacy, try again.”

It was fainter this time.

I took a step toward it then felt the warm air of a breath on the back of my neck. I spun around raising my Glock into the murky gray field in front of me.

“I know who you are, Gabriel, or would you rather I call you Philippe?” I said. “Give it up. The house will be surrounded in minutes.”

I saw a break in the field of vision to my right and squeezed the trigger, firing a shot. The tube of the TV exploded with a shattering of glass and a rush of air.

I took a step back, swinging the gun to the left. “Harrison!” I yelled.

The scent of Gabriel's cheap aftershave drifted past me. I spun on it, but my eyes could find nothing.

Fingers brushed the side of my cheek.

I started to turn but already knew I was too late. I had moved the wrong way. He was behind me, the cold skin of one hand tightening around my throat, the other taking hold of my hand holding the gun.

“You never chose,” he whispered in my ear.

His hand tightened around my throat. I could feel the sharp edges of his fingernails biting into my skin.

“Is it true what they say about blindness? Are all your other senses exploding with stimuli? What does fear smell like? Does it get lonely in the dark?”

“Go to hell.”

“Hell is where you make it, Lieutenant. A bedroom, a kitchen, a Dumpster . . . Hospitals are particularly suited to it.”

“You're going to die and nothing will have worked out
the way you saw it, the way you wrote it in your pathetic journal. The whole world doesn't fear you. They don't even know your name. You've failed.”

His hand tightened around my throat.

“What do you know of me? . . . Nothing!” His voice quivered with anger.

“I know you.”

He took two quick breaths like an animal standing over fallen prey. He was stronger than I realized. He bent my hand holding the gun back over my shoulder and placed the barrel against his own head.

“Kill me. Squeeze the trigger, hell is waiting.”

I started to tighten my finger around the trigger, but stopped. It couldn't be that simple, that clean. What game was he playing now?

“No,” I said.

He pulled me tightly against him and whispered in my ear, “Do you know how easy it is to take life? How willingly most people beg for it?”

I tightened my hand around the grip of the gun and pressed it hard against his temple.

“There're three wires on the timer strapped to your daughter.”

I could feel the pulse in his neck pressing against my cheek. It was slow, barely elevated, like that of a reptile.

“Pull the correct one, she lives. Pull the wrong one, you've killed your own daughter.”

I pressed the gun even harder against his head.

“You want to, don't you? You want to feel it. You want the power. We all do. . . . Kill me. . . . Put the bullet in my head. . . . I'd welcome the company.”

My finger slowly tightened on the trigger.

“I won't play any more games. Which wire?”

He shook his head. “What kind of a mother are you?”

There it was, the one question I had no answer to.

“Tell me which wire, or—”

“You'll kill your own child.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Because I've liked being a part of your family.”

“You're not part of my family.”

My finger slipped off the trigger.

“There're two minutes left on the timer. . . . Now there's less than two minutes.”

“I'll find you,” I whispered.

I felt the muscles on his jaw tighten.

“But who will I be?”

He was smiling. “I'll call Lacy's princess phone with the answer when you have thirty seconds.”

His hands slipped away from my wrist and throat.

“Of course, you could shoot me as I walk away. . . . It's up to you.”

He pressed himself against me for a moment, then slipped away. I stood frozen for a second, his words swirling around in my head. I spun around and raised my Glock. The dull field of my damaged vision shimmered like a curtain rustling in a breeze. I listened for a sound but heard none. I tested the air, searching for the sweet odor of Brut, but it was as gray and empty as my vision.

I pointed my weapon toward the darkness of the hallway and began to squeeze the trigger.

“Gabriel!” I yelled.

I aimed into the center of the soft, dark circle of the hallway.

Nothing.

I held on it for another moment, waiting for the creak of a floorboard, a shift in the pattern of light. My hand tensed, then I took a breath and lowered the Glock.

He was gone.

I held on the hallway for a moment, then turned my attention to the room.

“Lacy?”

If anything, my eyesight was getting worse. The blurry corona of sight on the borders of my vision was now filled with prisms of glaring color.

“I need you to make a sound if you can.”

I heard the faint creak of wood as if she was straining
against her bindings. I reached out my hand and began to walk forward. A scent I didn't remember smelling since she was an infant filled the air. My child's sweet, perfect scent.

I started to rush and caught my foot on something on the floor and began to stumble. I had forgotten all about the vest over my shoulders. I reached out, expecting to fall, when instead my hand found the corner bedpost and held on. I held my breath, waiting to see if the liquid in the sensor had uncovered the wire, waiting for a flash, and then emptiness.