Superstition (57 page)

“Vince.” Having by now fully internalized the fact that he was in a shitload of trouble here, Joe got busy, mentally reviewing and discarding various options for dealing with the situation. “I never shook your guys down, I never took your half a million, I never did any of that. You got some bad information from somebody. The guy that did it was named Brian Sawyer. He must have convinced your guys he was me.”

Vince looked at him. Joe could see the tightening of the other man’s face, the slight flexing of the shoulders and the hands, including the one holding the gun, and accepted the fact that Vince was now his enemy and, equally important, firmly set on the course he had embarked on. Even if Joe managed to persuade Vince that he was telling the truth about not taking his money—and it
was
the truth—he was still going to die.

Unless he could manage to do something to prevent it.

“I brought you down here to the island so I could watch you,” Vince said. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that with your reputation, you should never have been able to get a job with another police department as long as you lived? You thought some old friends were pulling strings for you, didn’t you?” He laughed. “You don’t got friends that good, let me tell you. It was me wanting you that brought you here. I thought you’d go for the money sooner or later, and then we’d know where it was, and I would get it back. But you’ve been smart about that, I have to give you credit. Haven’t touched a dime of it so far as I’ve been able to tell.”

“That’s because I don’t have it. I’m telling you, you’ve got the wrong guy.”

“What I didn’t know at the time was that you were working for the DEA,” Vince said, and Joe barely managed to stop himself from grimacing. Having Vince aware of that was not a positive thing. Drug dealers hated honest cops. They hated
and feared
the DEA. “Had I known it, I would have done things different, like had you whacked back in Jersey. But here you are, and here I am, and now I got no choice but to deal with the situation like it is.”

Vince turned, making a sharp beckoning motion to somebody in the shadows. Joe took advantage of Vince’s moment of inattention to slide his fingers down inside the right back pocket of his pants. If he was lucky . . .

He was. The last time he’d seen his handcuffs, they’d been on Sid Levin’s wrists. But the key was there in his pocket. Joe had just touched it when Milton and George Locke
—Et tu, George,
he thought bitterly—lugged something out of the shadows and dumped it on the floor in the middle of the circle of light.

Nicky,
eyes closed, limp as a bag of garbage, hands bound behind her back, bungee cord around her ankles, duct tape covering her mouth.

Joe broke out in a cold sweat.

SOMETHING WET and freezing cold smacked her in the face, and Nicky woke up slowly, a little groggily but enough to be aware that her head hurt and her arms ached—oh, wait, that was because they were tied behind her back. Also, her feet were asleep—ah, her ankles were bound—and there was something—duct tape?—over her mouth.

“She’s got nothing to do with this,” she heard Joe say in a sharp, hard tone. “This is between you and me. Let her go.”

That made her open her eyes. Her face was wet, she realized, with little rivulets of liquid dripping from it onto the floor. She was cold, shivering even. The room seemed to heave for a moment as if she were lying on the deck of a ship on the high seas instead of a mildewysmelling floor, but then her vision settled down enough that she could see that she was in some kind of old cellar or basement or something with a low ceiling, curving walls, and weird lighting. Joe was lying on his side on the floor about six feet in front of her, facing her, looking at her, his face tight with worry, his eyes dark with it. She gave him a little instinctive smile, because she was glad to see him even under the circumstances, or, as she thought about it,
especially
under the circumstances. Then she realized that she couldn’t smile because of the duct tape and grimaced instead, which didn’t work, either. Then she followed Joe’s gaze up to discover the mayor and a couple cops, Milton and one she didn’t immediately recognize, standing over her, all focused on Joe. The mayor was holding a gun, and the cop who wasn’t Milton—Locke, she thought his name was; he’d followed her around a time or two and she’d thought he was a nice guy—had a pocketknife in his hand. An open pocketknife with a shining silver blade.

It wasn’t a very big knife, but it was big enough to make her skin crawl. She was starting to develop a real phobia of knives.

The mayor snorted. “The hell it doesn’t have anything to do with her. She’s been poking her nose into stuff that doesn’t concern her, stirring things up, getting all kinds of people back in Jersey upset because she and her friends just can’t leave things alone. Business is up and things are going good and everything’s quiet, and that’s how we want it to stay. Little Miss Reporter here is making people nervous with the questions she’s been asking. Now that she’s found the trail, you think she’s just going to let it rest? Particularly if you disappear. She’ll be asking questions all over the place. Nobody wants that. Not good for business.”

“If
she
disappears, people will ask all kinds of questions.” Joe’s voice was faintly hoarse. He sounded afraid, and the idea that Joe was afraid scared Nicky worse than anything else. “Maybe nobody much will look for me, but
her—
you’re making a mistake with her. She’s got family, friends, a whole damned TV audience of probably millions who will be looking for her.”

“They won’t have to look for her.” The mayor gave Joe a smug-looking grin. “They’ll find her. And you, too. Tomorrow, maybe, or in a couple of days. See, lots of people—probably even some reporters—saw you two leave your house together in your cruiser, which is what gave me the idea to do it tonight.
Carpe diem,
right? At this moment, that cruiser is sinking to the bottom of Salt Marsh Creek. You two had a tragic accident, ran right off the road, and drowned before you could get out of the car. Your bodies were washed away, and when they turn up, you’ll be so decomposed, nobody will know for sure what the hell happened to you.”

Nicky realized that the thudding sound she heard was the hammering of her heart.

“It won’t work,” Joe said. But she could tell from his tone that he thought it might. His face was hard and set, paler than she had ever seen it. He was almost on his back now, looking up at the mayor out of narrowed eyes.

“Oh, yeah,” the mayor said with cool confidence. “It will. In fact, it couldn’t have played out any better. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to do this since Miss Reporter here started stirring the pot up in Jersey. Then tonight you gave it to me on a platter. With all the excitement because the Lazarus Killer’s been caught, you two will be just a tragic footnote to a bigger story. ‘Police chief and reporter killed in accident after unmasking killer.’ I can almost see the headlines.” He poked Nicky in the back with his foot. “Sounds like your kind of story, doesn’t it?”

Nicky flinched instinctively, and as she did, her eyes fell on something small and pink and sparkling wedged in a crack in the floor. A woman’s ring . . . It was so out of place that it made her frown, and then she realized that she was frowning because it niggled something deep in the recesses of her memory.

Without warning, the mayor reached down and ripped the duct tape from her mouth. The force of it yanked her head inches off the floor. The sudden sharp pain made her cry out. Joe started cursing, and made an abortive movement that was instantly stilled as the mayor pointed his gun at him.

“Goddamn you, Vince, if you hurt her . . .” Joe’s voice was thick and guttural with anger.

“That’s gonna be up to you.” He looked at Locke and held out his hand, and the cop put the pocketknife in it. Apparently, this was a common enough practice with them that it didn’t require words. Then, knife in hand, Vince shoved his gun around his back somewhere out of sight and knelt by Nicky’s side.

She sucked in air. Her gaze shot to Joe. She could see sweat beading on his upper lip now. He was as helpless as she was. Her stomach twisted, cramped.

And still that ring sparkled, sparkled, worming itself into her mind. . . .

“See, here’s how it’s going to go down,” Vince said to Joe. “I’m going to start cutting her face, and I’m going to keep cutting her face until either she has no face left or you tell me what I want to know.”

“Look here,” Nicky began desperately, forcing the words out through her dry, cramped throat, not sure where she was going with it but not about to just lie there in silence while she was carved up like a Thanks-giving turkey. “If all this is over just half a million dollars, maybe I can—”

Then she broke off as the memory of where she had seen that ring before struck her like a two-by-four over the head. In the picture of Lauren Schultz that was clipped to the front of her file, the teen was wearing that ring. She had just gotten it the day she disappeared, as a birthday gift from her parents.

Lauren Schultz’s ring, Tara Mitchell’s face cut to ribbons, Tara Mitchell’s father murdered the year after she had been . . .

“Oh my God,” Nicky gasped as she looked up at Vince. “You killed those girls. You killed Tara Mitchell, and Lauren Schultz, and Becky Iverson.”

For a moment, Vince simply stared back at her. Then a slow smile twisted his face.

“She’s smart,” he said in an approving tone, glancing at Joe. “Real smart. Yeah, the Mitchell girl’s dad ripped me off, too. I had to send a message. The other girls—well, they were there in the house. They weren’t part of the message, so we brought them down here.”

So many years, so much loss, so much pain—that he could dismiss those bright, young lives snuffed out, the anguish to the parents, the years spent searching, with little more than a shrug sent flames of fury shooting through Nicky’s veins. Before she thought, she spat in his face.

For a moment, the world seemed to stop. Everything, time itself, seemed to freeze. The spittle had only reached his chin, and Vince stared down at her with widening eyes as he seemed to register its presence. Then realization hit and his face contorted. With a roar of rage, he reared back . . .

And a gun exploded, loud as a bomb in that enclosed space.

Vince shrieked and fell back.

“Roll against the wall, Nicky,” Joe screamed, and in the split second it took her to hear and obey, she saw that he was lying on his stomach, unbound hands stretched out before him clutching a pistol, taking two-handed aim . . .

As she rolled, more bullets exploded as the bad guys started shooting back.

Then she was against the wall, huddled as tight against the cold, hard stone as she could get, screaming, eyes closed, ears ringing, nostrils filling with the acrid smell of gunfire as bullets smacked into rock all around her and then ricocheted around the walls like deadly pinballs with whistling screams that echoed her own. Joe, somehow totally free now, crouched over her, snapping off shots.

A man yelled, “Shut the door! Leave ’em!” and she thought it was Vince, but she was too scared to look around to make sure, and then there was the clang of metal on metal and, finally, silence.

Eerie, echoing silence.

“Are you okay?” Joe asked after a moment, sounding breathless. He was moving, doing something with her handcuffs. Even as she nodded yes, she heard a tiny metallic click and then her hands were free.

That caused her eyes to pop open.

“How?” she asked, daring to move, sitting up and chafing her wrists and staring at Joe, who was now unfastening the cord around her ankles.

“I had a handcuff key in my pocket.” He grinned at her as the cord came off, and it struck her that he was looking all cocky and sure of himself and full of himself—in a totally sexy, charming way, of course, because this was Joe, and sexy and charming was what he did. She could tell that he was giving himself a big mental “Attaboy,” and that made her smile because it was clear that at heart, her big, bad cop was still just a little kid.

“The gun?” she asked.

His grin broadened. “I always keep a spare for emergencies.” Then he pulled up his trouser leg to show her the holster strapped around his ankle. “Just thank your lucky stars nobody ever taught these guys the right way to do a pat-down.”

Nicky had to admit it: She was impressed.

“Wow,” she said.

“You can thank me properly later.” He met her eyes with a glint in his that left her in no doubt about what he had in mind. Then he stood, pulled her up and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Oh, yeah.

Only they couldn’t, as they discovered within minutes. Six running steps in the opposite direction from which Vince and company had taken, and they were in a passage, a narrow, cavelike passage. A passage that was closed off with an iron door. An iron door with a mesh peephole the size of a schoolkid’s notebook near the top of it. As they approached the door, water started gushing through the peephole, spilling down the door like a waterfall, splashing on the floor. Puddling on the floor. Pooling on the floor.

“Shit,” Joe said, staring at it.

Nicky tugged at his hand. “Let’s try the other way.”

They retraced their steps, racing through the chamber that widened off the passage like the bulge of prey in a snake’s belly, only to narrow again into another passage—that ended in another door. A door without a peephole. A locked iron door. A locked iron door with the lock on the other side.

“Shit,” Joe said again, bestowing one final kick on it as all efforts to open it proved futile.

Nicky was starting to think that that was the understatement of the century.

She turned and looked back the way they had come as the rushing sound of water filled her ears.

That was when she faced the awful truth: They were locked in an underground passage that was rapidly filling with water.

Only dignity and a total wish not to humiliate herself in front of Joe kept her from clapping both hands to her cheeks and screaming “We’re all gonna die!”