The Unseen (33 page)

He heard the door squeak open. “Give it up now, son.” Lucas waited, remaining quiet. He heard the officer's shoes squeak on the fake tile of the bathroom floor, but couldn't see what was happening: the pipe blocked his view of what happened below as much as it blocked the floor-level view of his own body.

A couple more steps, and then the shoes squeaking more. Metal—handcuffs, maybe—jangled on the officer as he turned.

A few seconds later, one of the stall doors below slammed open. Then the next. More footsteps, going toward the sink, checking the vanity cupboard.

Lucas heard a deep sigh, a muttered curse under the breath. Finally the officer spoke. “This is Fisher. All clear in the men's restroom.”

A crackling voice answered Fisher, indicating the women's restroom was clear. Another reported the kitchen search was in progress.

Lucas heard the door to the bathroom swing open again, then begin to whisk shut.

Unfortunately, that's when the TracFone in his pocket started to ring.

THIRTY

03:42:41 REMAINING

The bathroom door swung open again, and the officer's voice bellowed, “Show yourself.”

The phone rang once more. He was sure it was Sarea—he had to move to silence it—which would give up his location. And doing nothing would let the phone continue ringing, which would also give up his location.

He said, lowly and clearly, “I'm going to answer the phone.”

“No, you're not. You're going to show yourself.”

Lucas slid his pack around, found the phone, and fished it out. At the same time, he grabbed one of the ceiling brackets with one hand and slid himself down to a hanging position before dropping to the floor.

The police officer, a large, beefy man who was breathing heavily behind red cheeks, looked at him with his mouth agape.

The caller ID showed Sarea's number calling back, so he pressed the Answer button. “Sarea, listen. This is Lucas.”

On the other end of the line, a voice that wasn't Sarea's interrupted. “Lucas. What a wonderful name. Much better than Humpty.” He recognized the terrifying voice immediately. Hondo. “Sarea can't come to the phone right now. She's a bit tied up.”

Lucas glanced at the police officer, who was pointing something at him, something that wasn't a gun, and screaming for him to get facedown on the ground
now
.

In his ear, Hondo's voice came again. “Sarea needs you, Lucas,” he said, emphasizing his name carefully. “You know where she lives, don't you?”

“Listen, if you—” But that was all Lucas got out, because he saw something coming from the thing the police officer was holding, something that looked like a tiny dart on a wire, and then the tiny dart-thing was on his chest, and then a huge wave of white static overwhelmed him and he was falling, falling, falling, and as he was falling he was smelling something like an electrical short, yes, an electrical short filled with white static.

And the white static turned into black pain.

03:22:03 REMAINING

When he awoke, he thought he was still dreaming, remixing his moments in the back of Snake's car. His hands were bound behind him, and he was traveling in the backseat of a car to . . . somewhere he didn't know.

So yes, he had to be dreaming, because all of this had happened to him before, he knew. Soon Clarice would pull over and let him out of the back of the car, and they would be at the giant church with the Blackboard.

He opened his eyes, saw the wire cage separating him from the officers sitting in the front seat of the police cruiser.

No dream. And he definitely wasn't going to a church.

He would be taken into police custody, thrown into a small room for a couple hours, questioned for several more, then booked and thrown into a jail cell until he could post bond.

Unfortunately, by that time, Sarea would be attacked by Hondo and the remaining members of the Creep Club would want revenge because they thought he had killed Snake, Clarice, and Kennedy. After all, the papers had said as much.

Even his own eyes said so—he'd seen the shooter.

On top of that, he would be dead because his leg would explode some time in the next few hours. Maybe while he sat in the interrogation room.

His mouth tasted like he'd been chewing on ashes from a fireplace, and his ears rang with a slow, steady roar.

“What . . .” he creaked, but his voice barely came in a whisper. He cleared his throat, swallowed a few times, tried again as the police officer riding shotgun—the beefy one who had shot him—turned to look.

“What did you do to me?” he asked.

Beefy Cop smiled. “I tased ya.”

Tased, tased, tased. Suddenly, an image came to his mind, a young man being held by police officers and pleading, “Don't tase me, Bro.”

A taser. Yes, Lucas was familiar with the contraption, something of a stun gun that pumped several thousand volts of electricity through the intended victim, incapacitating said victim for several minutes.

“Count yourself lucky,” Beefy Cop said. “We had orders. Been up to me, I woulda shot you with the .38.”

“Well,” Lucas said, working his jaw a bit more. “Lucky me.”

They drove in silence for a few more minutes, and as they did, Lucas's despair grew. His eyes scanned the cruiser's interior, and his mind turned over every possibility he could think of. Force the car to crash? No; the mesh cage and handcuffs prevented that from happening. Unlock the car door and slip out, the way he'd been able to do in the cab? No chance; he knew the doors of these police cruisers couldn't be unlocked from the back. A careful look at the windows of the cruiser showed the glass was reinforced, which ruled out spinning to his back and kicking the glass—something he doubted could easily be done even with regular auto glass.

With no viable options available, he would have to wait until they got to the station. Maybe, during the transfer from the car to the cell, he'd be able to break free and make his escape. His hands would still be bound, but he didn't have many choices.

Barring a miracle of some sort, it was his best option.

They drove on in silence for a few more blocks, the officers not seeming to be in any particular hurry. And with each passing second, the futility of it all weighed heavier on Lucas—so much so that he finally had to scream in rage and frustration.

Both Beefy Cop and the more athletic one in the driver's seat jumped, startled by the guttural cry that escaped from his lips. Beefy Cop turned to say something to him, and in doing so, missed Lucas's miracle, coming to meet them from the passenger side of the vehicle.

A giant black SUV, doing at least fifty, and hurtling at the police cruiser without slowing.

03:05:49 REMAINING

To Lucas, the impact sounded like an explosion: a giant
whump
that knocked the wind out of him as the mesh cage in front of him crumpled.

For a few seconds, he heard the painful sound of metal shuddering against metal, something like fingernails on a chalkboard amplified a million times, but then there was an odd moment of silence as he felt the cruiser tipping and rolling to its side.

He tumbled in the backseat as the car flipped a few times and finally came to a stop. Now the only sounds were a low, menacing hiss of escaping steam and the squawk of static from the car's shortwave radio.

He wasn't sure whether the car was resting on its roof or on its tires, but it didn't matter: he saw that the fortified glass window beside him had indeed webbed in a million tiny lines. He swung his legs around and kicked at the glass; it fell away like a heavy curtain.

He started to slide out of the window when he heard a croaking voice: “Stop.”

He looked back over his shoulder, and Beefy Cop had his trusty .38 drawn, pointed at him through the mesh. Beefy Cop was still strapped in, and a large flap of flesh from his forehead was hanging down over his right eye, pouring blood down his face, but one clear eye stared straight at him behind the barrel of the pistol.

Beefy Cop smiled a crooked smile, his teeth painted pink by the blood in his mouth. “Looks like I'll get to use my .38 after all,” he said.

Lucas watched as the finger on the trigger started to tighten, and he couldn't help it; he had to close his eyes. He didn't want to see the gun go off in his face. He heard the giant wallop of the gun inside the cramped space, hammering once and then twice, and he squeezed his eyes even tighter, surprised at how painless, how almost effortless, it was to be shot at point-blank range.

THIRTY-ONE

03:04:19 REMAINING

Lucas opened his eyes once more. Yes, he could see. Maybe he'd been shot in the head, but both of his eyes were intact, and no blood was running into them.

A few seconds later, he felt someone tugging at his feet, pulling him out the car window.

When he was totally outside, his first thought was,
Ah, so the car
landed on its roof.
Crazy. And his second thought was pure terror, because the person who had pulled him from the car was the one person he was most afraid of seeing.

It was the assassin who had been stalking him. The assassin who wore his face.

03:03:57 REMAINING

The man who wore Lucas's face slipped a semiautomatic weapon with a silencer into a hidden holster, flipped Lucas onto his side, and began fumbling with keys. Lucas looked back inside the car and saw two thin streams of blood drizzling from the unmoving bodies of the police officers.

Numbly he realized he hadn't been shot at all. The man currently unlocking his handcuffs had shot the officers.

His pursuer stood and offered a hand to Lucas; Lucas, overcome with revulsion at the thought of touching the other man's bare skin
(his own skin),
boosted himself to a sitting position and then stood.

The Other was larger than he—heavier, thicker across the chest, and taller—but the face was still unsettling. “Are you okay?” his face asked him with his voice.

Lucas opened his mouth, closed it again, decided it was best to speak. “Yeah. I think I'm okay, all things considered.”

“What do you see when you look into my face?” the man asked.

“What?”

“The face. Whose face do you see?”

“I see . . . me.”

The man pursed his lips
(his own lips)
for a moment. “That's a new one,” was all he said as he held out something for Lucas.

Lucas looked at the man's offering and saw it was another pistol much like the one the man had just secreted away, right down to the silencer attached to the tip.

“What's this for?” he asked weakly. He felt as if he were on drugs of some kind, drugs that filtered everything he said through a thick layer of cotton.

“Oh, I think you've used one before,” the man said. He handed two more clips to Lucas. “It's a Taurus 45-caliber. You've got a full clip in there, plus these two extra, which means thirty rounds. Think you can make thirty rounds last?”

Lucas nodded, and the man smiled; Lucas hoped he didn't look that unsettling when he smiled.

“You'd better get going. You're still twenty minutes from Sarea's,” the man with his face said.

Lucas looked from the pistol back to his own face, but the mention of Sarea brought some life back. “Yeah,” he said, finally putting his hand behind his back and tucking the gun into the back of his pants. He briefly considered putting it in his backpack, but he might need quicker access.

“Take my car,” the man said.

Lucas followed where the man was pointing and saw the steaming hunk of the black SUV, pink coolant trickling from the mangled radiator. “Doesn't look like it will get me far,” said Lucas.

The man smiled, hit the button on the key fob in his hand. “That wasn't mine,” he said.

Behind the SUV, another black vehicle—this one a nice sedan—hiccuped and flashed its parking lights. “That one's mine.” He tossed the keys to Lucas.

Almost as if on cue, the warble of approaching sirens floated through the air. Odd, now that Lucas thought about it: there were no other cars, no pedestrians, on this street. He looked at the next block and saw traffic flowing; same with the traffic a block behind them. But here, at this intersection, there were only the two twisted heaps of what had once been cars and the black sedan, waiting with its driver's-side door open.

Lucas turned to look at the man with his face once again, but the figure was gone.

After a few more seconds, Lucas was gone too.

02:48:12 REMAINING

The man with his face was wrong.

Lucas wasn't twenty minutes away from Sarea's apartment complex; he made it there in less than fifteen.

As he neared the complex, he let his foot off the accelerator. He had considered speeding into the parking lot, leaping from the car before it had fully stopped, and letting the automatic pistol mow down everything that moved.

But that wouldn't be smart. He had to be careful.

He parked the car down the street, left the keys in it, and made his way down the sidewalk to Sarea's building. No sense trying to hide; they knew he was coming. They wanted him to come.

Pausing to shift the load of his backpack, Lucas went up the walkway toward Sarea's apartment. He climbed the steps to the second floor, considered knocking, and decided to try the doorknob.

It moved easily.

Pushing the door open with his left hand, he reached behind his back and pulled out the pistol as he entered the apartment.

Music—familiar music—filled the entryway, which led directly to the living room. Something bluesy, with a slide guitar.

Abruptly, Sarea came around the corner, dressed in a bathrobe with a towel on her head. Her eyes caught Lucas standing in the doorway, pointing a gun toward her.

“Just for future reference,” she said, “you could probably ring the doorbell next time.”

He stepped into the apartment, closing the door behind him and locking it. “You always take showers with your door unlocked?”