Wicked Fix (50 page)

And Mike was moving fast, squirting more flammable

stuff, its fumes thickly choking.

"If you light a match now, there'll be an explosion.

You'll go up along with us. Think: There's got to be a

way to settle all this without--"

He looked pityingly at me, shaking his head, then

went to a panel of switches at the end of the work area

and examined them. Finally he flipped one of them,

and I heard an electric motor begin turning somewhere,

felt cool air moving against my face.

"Ventilation," Paddy said defeatedly. "For working

with dye and solvents and so on. With the

draft ..."

He slumped against his bonds. I got it: That fan

would suck the fire into an inferno, just like a chimney.

"Mike," Ellie began sternly. "I want you to stop all

this nonsense right this--"

He began lighting the sparklers, quickly, one after

the other. I thought he might say something more, but

he didn't. Not a word. Everything had already been

said.

Finally he approached me with the syringe, its

wicked tip glittering, stepped behind me, and stabbed

me abruptly with it.

"Sorry," he said softly. "I really did like you." I

felt the stuff going in, a brilliant shot of anguish and a

hot, swelling lump in my shoulder. His hand hovered

over a switch by the door.

The lights went out. The door slammed. He was

gone.

Instantly, we were shouting, struggling, fighting to

escape that damned macrame twine, but without,

please God, tipping over one of the sparklers, whose

heads fizzed glaringly in the darkness and reflected

from the flammable pools around them.

"Damn it, Sondergard, you wimp," Paddy grated

out, his voice tight with the pain of pulling against the

rough cords that held him. "You should've--"

"What?" Willow demanded, the word a sob. "Let

that bastard get his knife into me? Paddy, you always

were a heartless ..."

"Quiet." Wade's deep voice sounded authoritatively

in the flame-punctured darkness. "Just work on

these ties. Tear your skin off if you have to, there's fire

extinguishers all around, on the walls. Just get to one,

and--"

The injection hadn't hit me yet. Apparently it had

all gone into my shoulder muscle, and not into a vein.

But in the next few moments I wondered if that was

lucky or not:

A spark fell. Instantly, flame billowed up. In its

glow, all the room filled up with shadows, dancing

evilly as lines of blue flame skittered horridly from one

pool to the next.

A whump! of fire exploded to the ceiling, blocking

my last view of Ellie, her eyes dark pools of fright.

Willow began to scream, a high, wordless shriek of

protest.

Blood slicked my wrists. The cords slid, only the

tiniest amount. Wade bumped his chair toward me,

wanting, I supposed, to help me, but nothing was helping.

And nothing was going to. Through a rising haze

of whatever it was he'd shot me up with a puddle of

fire crept toward me, pausing nastily for an instant,

then coming on with a rush. The air was choking, searing

my eyes and throat. Somewhere a bottle exploded,

and a worse reek filled my nose stingingly: fabric dyeing

chemicals.

With a tearing sound that I realized only distantly

was my own flesh ripping, one of my hands came free.

But I couldn't do anything with it, the other and my

ankles were still bound, and what I smelled now, hideously,

was the stink of burning hair.

Howling from somewhere. Another explosion.

Scalding-hot air like a lungful of boiling water ripped

down my windpipe.

Suffocation, I realized; hot smoke and burning

chemicals. Then it seemed I was being carried away.

Something inside me dug its heels in, wouldn't go.

But there was no help for it.

People say having a near-death experience is

fascinating: the white light, your relatives all

beckoning to you, and so on.

Personally, I've seen enough white lights

in my life not to be unduly impressed by another one,

and if you knew my relatives, you would know why I

don't find the notion of them waving to me particularly

attractive, either. In my youth, before I got on that

Greyhound, when any of my relatives beckoned it was

usually to get some fool to pull over so they could

hijack his truck.

"Mom," Sam said from his chair in the corner of

my bedroom; since what we had taken to calling "the

incident," he refused to let me out of his sight for very

long.

"What?" I opened my eyes. It had been three days,

and I was beginning to get a little concerned about

him.

"Are you sure a Ouija board takes two people to

operate?" He frowned at the card table where he had

the dratted thing set up. "Because ..."

"Sam," I said patiently, as well as I could through

my sore, smoke-rasped vocal cords. My hand was bandaged,

and the injected sedative had made me sick as a

dog; I didn't remember what the emergency people had

done about it, only that it hadn't been pleasant.

"A Ouija board doesn't take any people to operate.

A Ouija board doesn't do anything."

He frowned stubbornly. "But ..."

Just then Ellie hurried up the stairs and came in,

looking lovely and au courant in her new short haircut.

Only a few small places on her ear still showed pink

where she had been burned.

Thirty seconds more, Bob Arnold had said, and it

would have been the ball game. As it was, Mike Car

pentier had managed a solid base hit: The building was

rubble, everything Paddy owned gone, the space nothing

but a blackened crater.

But everyone had made it out alive. "He's here,"

Ellie said. "Should I send him up?"

"Dad!" Sam rushed to the stairwell. "Hey, Dad--

you weren't supposed to get here until ..."

"Tonight," Victor agreed, coming in without being

invited to survey me in all my invalid splendor.

I'd been told to stay down. The lungfuls of vapors

I'd gotten had been pretty corrosive, and I was struggling

to obey. But what Victor said next made me want

to hop up and swat him mightily.

"I convinced them," he intoned loftily, "of my innocence,

at last." He glanced at me, caught my expression.

"Of course," he added hastily, "your mother did

help."

"Uh, yeah," Sam replied dubiously, glancing at me

also. "It was a real team effort."

Clearly, Sam was deciding whether he wanted to

get into this subject with his father right off the bat. I

shook my head--Victor was always at his most impossible,

following a narrow escape--and after a moment

Sam grinned at me, rolling his eyes.

"Yeah," he said, clapping Victor on the shoulder in

mock congratulations. "Good job, Dad."

Victor glanced suspiciously at him, seeming to

know he was being made sport of, then let it go.

"So what's this story Chief Arnold told me about a

burning building?" he wanted to know.

His tone conveyed clearly that this sort of thing

was little more than he expected of me, considering my

complete lack of any common sense whatsoever.

Which, looking at Victor and realizing that once upon

a time I had believed it was a good idea to marry him, I

thought was pretty much right on the money.

"It's a long story," I said. "But it was Sam and

Tommy Daigle who got us out of it. And Ellie. Without

her, we'd have been toast. Although," I added with a

sharp glance at Sam, "it sure took you long enough."

"Mom," he defended himself, spreading his hands.

"We had to find Bob Arnold. And then we had to convince

him, which on account of Clarissa was busy having

the baby--"

Clarissa, it turned out, had delivered a perfectly

lovely and absolutely healthy eight-pound girl, just at

the very moment that Ellie was in the act of having her

hair burned off. Furthermore, Clarissa had done it at

home after a labor of about ten minutes, so Bob Arnold

had been understandably distracted.

"But how did you know to go get Bob Arnold, is

what I don't see," Victor questioned, having apparently

already heard some of the story's details but not

all of them.

He frowned puzzledly. "You see them in a car and

they go one way, you go the other. So how ... ?"

"That's where Ellie came in," I said. Even for Ellie,

it had been amazingly quick thinking.

"The boys were behind us in their car. And on the

way down a hill, it would be normal to touch the

brakes. Mike wouldn't suspect any mischief. So Ellie

did touch them: Morse code. SOS."

The idea still blew me away: Sam and Tommy fooling

around with something, and later it saved all our

lives.

"Well, isn't that clever, now," Victor congratulated

Ellie patronizingly.

Fortunately for him, he didn't reach out and pat

her on the head. The gleam in her eye at the moment

reminded me that in the old days, Ellie's rascal ancestors

used to while away the time between looting

square-riggers and swigging rum by filing their teeth

into sharp points.

Now she only smiled, a thoughtful, private smile,

as Victor turned away. "But why would this Mike have

been suspicious?" he queried, and began picking

snoopily through the items ranged out across my

dresser top.

"From what Arnold told me," he went on, "until

he snapped, and began behaving in a somewhat suspicious

manner ..."

He picked up a silver button I had found between

two old floorboards in the attic, made a dismissive

face, and tossed it down onto the crocheted dresser

scarf.

"... no one suspected him," he finished. Then he

began poking into the jewelry box that Wade had built

for me, his attitude proprietary, as if he had a perfect,

inalienable right to do so.

"He shouldn't have been suspicious of us," Ellie

answered, seeing that I was speechless with fury. "But

he had a guilty conscience. So he thought we understood