The Devil's Touch (16 page)

Lucien touched his cheek where the skin was still a raised welt and grinned ruefully.

The limousine was just turning on to Hudson Street. Up ahead he could see the T-intersection lights out front of the hotel. Lucien turned to Angelica again and gazed into her eyes for a long silent moment.

For a man in complete command – a man who spoke with authority and confidence – he seemed suddenly at a loss for words. He sensed the limousine slowing. Beyond the vehicle’s tinted windows he could see the hotel’s grand façade coming into view. He reached for Angelica’s hand.

“I’m no angel,” Lucien said, “and I probably never will be. You need to know that.”

“I know,” Angelica nodded. “I’m the only angel in this relationship – I just wish you were a little less…”

“Evil?”

“I was going to say ‘heartless’.”

He winked. “I’ll work on it.”

The last thing Lucien saw was Angelica’s smiling hopeful face. Then, in an instant, their worlds were ripped apart.

John Darrow circled the block three times before he finally found a suitable parking space. He nosed the SUV into the gap between a small Japanese compact and a delivery van.

He left the engine running and unfastened his seat belt.

There had been other parking spaces on the side street but he had discounted them for different reasons. One was too close to the Hudson Street intersection. Another was too far away. He needed a position that would give him a clear view of the intersection where the hotel stood, but also give him the distance he would need to gather momentum.

He was drowsy – the combination of sleeplessness and the alcohol coursing through his veins. He stared down at the steering wheel and smiled bleakly at the mangled plastic that had housed the driver’s side air bag.

The photo of his wife and son lay on the passenger seat beside him. He glanced at it, but he didn’t dare touch it; he knew that if he did his resolve might weaken. He was rational enough to know that his only chance to carry though with his plan was the irrational belief that this would make things better.

That somehow, someday, this would make things right.

He leaned back in his seat and watched the flow of traffic sweeping across the intersection.

And he waited.

When at last he saw the limousine, John Darrow felt a sudden consuming rage. The vehicle was slowing to a crawl as it approached the entrance to the hotel. Darrow bared his teeth and felt his heart begin to race. He glimpsed down at the photo beside him one last time, and then crushed his foot down on the accelerator pedal.

The SUV leaped forward, weaving around a small white van and then gathering speed as the intersection flashed closer. Darrow tightened his grip on the wheel.

He was crying as the SUV ran through the intersection at high speed, clipping the tail of a red sedan with a scream of rending metal, and then hurtling at full speed into the unprotected side of Lucien Lance’s limousine.

The impact was tremendous; a roar of twisting, buckling metal. The side panels of the limousine crumpled around the SUV, the shattering force of the collision lifting John Darrow bodily out through the shattered windscreen and flinging him – already dead – over the mangled vehicles and onto the concrete sidewalk.

In the horrific silence after the crash the air around the vehicles began to shimmer as gasoline from the severed fuel line spilled across the tarmac. It ignited with a soft ‘whoosh!’ and orange flames began to lick and flicker.

The impact of John Darrow’s vehicle momentarily lifted the limousine onto two wheels and sprung the curbside door wide open.

Lucien was flung from the vehicle by the crushing force. He felt sharp pain low on his hip, and his shoulder smashed against the doorframe before he was hurled to the sidewalk.

Lucien came awake laying in a spreading pool of his own blood. He shook his head dazedly. His vision was blurred and his face felt wet. He brushed at his forehead and his hand came away covered in blood.

There was more on his trousers, and his coat sleeve had been shredded open and clung sticky and red to his arm.

He got to his knees. There was a man’s body on the sidewalk just a few feet away. The man was laying face down on the concrete and Lucien would have thought him asleep if it had not been for the horrific wreckage that had been his head.

Lucien turned and looked back to the limousine, a sudden urgent panic seizing his chest.

“Angelica!”

Through the open door he could see her laying across the back seat.

He stumbled to his feet. He saw Angelica’s head lift off the leather and turn to the sound of his voice. Her face was ashen, her eyes huge and terrified. Her mouth fell open in a painful moan.

Lucien lurched to the limousine. Flames were leaping and dancing around his feet as petrol spilled towards the curbside gutter.

The side of the vehicle Angelica had been sitting on had taken the full crushing force of the collision. Lucien crawled inside the crumpled car and hooked his hands under her armpits.

“I’ll get you out.”

“No!” Angelica cried. “You can’t. My foot is jammed.”

Lucien glanced down in panic. Mangled metal had clamped around her ankle as if she were snared within the jaws of a bear trap. Lucien looked around in desperation.

There was nothing. Nothing he could use as a lever.

He crouched down and tried to pull one of the bars free, the muscles in his shoulder and arm bunching against the enormous strain until his vision began to pinwheel from the strain.

He crawled back onto the buckled seat and took Angelica’s face in his hands. “There will be a lever in the trunk. I’ll come back for you.”

Angelica’s eyes went wide with terror. She could feel the heat of the flames now, and she could see bubbling paintwork and smoldering chunks of glowing metal.

Lucien shook her shoulders. “I will come back for you!”

Lucien’s chauffeur was lying slumped over the wheel of the vehicle, covered in shattered glass. Lucien tore the door open and hauled the unconscious man to the sidewalk. There were sirens wailing in the distance, the sounds a deceptive echo that came loudly and then receded as the noise bounced off the sheer walls of the towering skyscrapers.

Lucien looked around him. The doorman from the hotel was kneeling over the body of the dead man and crowds of stunned pedestrians were beginning to gather, but keeping their distance as the crushed side of the limousine suddenly became engulfed in flame.

Lucien reached down beside the driver’s seat and lifted the trunk release lever. Then he staggered to the back of the car.

There was a tyre lever wedged into the framework of the trunk’s interior. Lucien grabbed at it. His hands were slick and slippery with his blood and he felt suddenly heavy – as though a great weight were draped over his shoulders. He steeled himself and dragged his way back to the open door.

Across the wreckage a man with a small fire extinguisher was pulling the pin from the trigger and aiming the nozzle into the flames around the SUV.

For a moment there was a bizarre hush – as though the world had suddenly been silenced – and then the puddled fuel in the gutter burst alight – an impossible waist-high wall of scorching heat between Lucien and Angelica.

“No!”

Lucien reeled away from the car, hurling himself flat to the ground as the fuel ignited. He felt a blast of intense heat sear the side of his face and then he sat up, stunned and trembling.

Angelica was going to burn to death.

The horror of it struck Lucien like a fist. He staggered to his feet, tyre lever still in his bloodied hand, and cast about him with wild desperation.

The sirens were closer now – still not in sight – but the wailing horns were loud in his ears.

Not close enough.

He turned to the hotel doorman who was kneeling over the dead man’s body, and he screamed at the man. “Your jacket! Give it to me!”

He was an older man with a thinning thatch of grey hair and sad grey eyes. He looked up at Lucien in confusion.

“Give me your damn jacket!”

Lucien ripped off his own coat, clamping his jaw tight as a sharp pain wrenched in his shoulder. He noticed blood down the left side of his body. It had soaked his shirt bright red and stained the waistband of his trousers.

Lucien snatched the doorman’s jacket from his hand and went back towards the burning limousine, holding his coat like a matador. When he could get no closer he threw his coat over the flames, and for precious seconds the smothering weight of the thick material dampened the heat. He threw the doorman’s jacket on top of his and lunged through the opening.

Angelica had curled her body up into a tight ball, trying to cringe away from the heat, but still pinned by her leg.

“We’ve got one chance,” Lucien gasped. The heated air burned in his throat and lungs. “Be ready!”

He clambered over her and then reached down into the foot well. He jammed the tyre lever against the thinnest of the bars that held Angelica’s leg entrapped – and then cried out in pain as he threw all his weight against the lever.

The bar moved.

He tried again, breathing shallowly. He hunched his back and took the strain. A fresh wash of blood began to ooze through his shirt. Then he flung the last shreds of his energy against the mangled wreckage.

The bar moved again. An inch. Lucien held the lever; bracing himself against the immense weight and feeling the pressure crush bones and sinew in his hand. His vision burst into stars behind his eyes.

“Now!” he grunted.

Angelica wriggled her foot one way and then the other. Skin smeared from her ankle – and then suddenly she was free.

Lucien tried to take her up in his arms but he was too weak. Pain tore across his shoulder and down his left side. He peered through the rear window of the limousine. He could see flashing red and blue lights at the end of the street.

“Go!” he gasped. He pushed Angelica across the seat towards the open door.

Flames were licking at the edges of the doorman’s heavy jacket now, turning the material black. Smoldering heat and smoke rose up before them. He pushed Angelica again. The heat hammered at them with incredible intensity.

“Get out!” Lucien shouted. “Get out now!” He pushed her again, and she fell tumbling awkwardly, landing on the sidewalk. He saw her get to her feet shaky and limping.

The terrible weight bore down on Lucien again – the weight that he had felt heavy on his shoulders – and this time he let it come. This time he did not resist.

The weight seemed to melt down through his bones so that all Lucien could do was to slump back against the seat and close his eyes.

Lucien saw it as a series of brief nightmarish sequences, as he slipped in and out of consciousness.

The limousine began to fill with smoke and he saw tiny fingers of flame singe through the heavy material of the jackets.

And then darkness.

When he opened his eyes again he could see the edges of the leather seat beginning to smolder. He glanced down and stared at the blue tendrils of smoke with bemused fascination.

And then darkness.

A loud roar of noise roused him. His head lolled to the side and his eyes blinked open, and for a moment he wondered if it was snowing. The limousine seemed to be buried by a blizzard.

And then darkness.

When he woke up again he was looking into a pair of steady blue eyes. A man’s eyes. The man was masked. Lucien tried to warn the man that he was in danger, but when he opened his mouth no words would form. He tried to push the man to safety, but there was no feeling in his arm.

No feeling in his body at all…

Once Lucien had been dragged from the smoldering wreckage, the paramedics worked quickly while firefighters continued to douse the vehicles in dense foam.

Lucien was laid out on the sidewalk and his face covered with an oxygen mask. Another paramedic cut away his shirt, peeling aside the blood-soaked material to reveal a jagged four-inch gash below his armpit. They found another deep wound above his ear.

“He’ll live,” one of the men pronounced.

Angelica sank to her knees and wept soft slow tears of relief.

They loaded the gurney into the back of a waiting ambulance and Lucien was fed fluids through a drip. He was lucid now, weary but alert – resuscitated by the oxygen, but numbed by drugs against the pain of his injuries.

Angelica clambered into the back of the vehicle and perched herself beside the attending paramedic. One of the firefighters pushed the double doors gently closed then slapped his palm against the side panel.

The ambulance began to edge slowly through the mayhem of the accident site, lights flashing but the siren silent. Angelica reached for Lucien’s uninjured hand and squeezed it reassuringly.

Then, quite suddenly, the ambulance braked to a halt, and the doors were pulled open by a uniformed policeman.

“We found this photograph in the wreckage of the SUV,” he explained. “Do you recognize any of these people?”

Lucien’s face paled with shock and Angelica felt nausea scald the back of her throat. They both recognized the man.

Lucien nodded. “John Darrow.”

“And the others? The boy or the woman?”

Lucien shook his head. “No, I don’t know them.” The policeman turned the photo to Angelica and held it a little closer. She shook her head.

The policeman nodded – but then frowned suddenly. “Did this Mr Darrow… did you know him well?”

“We were business associates,” Lucien muttered.

The policeman’s face remained worried. “Do you know if he dabbled in… in things like Satanic worship, or the occult?”

Lucien looked incredulous. “I doubt that very much, officer. Why?”

“Motive,” the policeman said. “I just can’t work out why he would do something like this – and why he would leave such a bizarre suicide note – if that’s what he’s written, on the back of the photo.”

“He left a note?” Lucien felt a slow growing sense of disquiet. “Can I see?”