The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets)

by James, Harper

  The sight of Vasiliev’s man spread out in front of him made him think of Vasiliev himself with the top of his head blown off. He hadn’t told Guillory or anyone else about that yet. He looked out across the fields to where he’d left the body hidden in the undergrowth. The breeze had picked up now, blowing in his face, a clean, fresh smell unlike the smell in the basement. He closed his eyes and angled his face into the wind, wishing it would blow his whole head clear.

  He was wasting time. He opened his eyes again and saw something glistening wetly in the sun. Saw something that made his legs go weak. He should go back inside, get Guillory and the others. There wasn’t time. He ran to edge of the yard, saw blood and bits of a man’s insides in the grass at the edge of the field. Standing right above the wet, sticky mess, he turned his head to the right, looked directly at the gutted man. He turned his head back a hundred and eighty degrees, stared out across the fields directly at the small woods where his car was hidden.

  It was as good as an arrow drawn on the ground.

  He felt behind his back, made sure the gun was still there. He sent up a silent prayer to whatever deity had stopped him from handing it over to the traffic cop and set off running across the fields.

  At the edge of the small woods he knew he was right. A second dollop of sticky, slimy innards adorned the branches of a bush. He bent over, rested his hands on his knees and caught his breath, his eyes scanning the ground for further bloody directions.

  Ahead of him, a path curved away into the woods which weren’t as small as he’d thought. He knew it was the way he had to go even before he took the first few steps down the path and saw another mound of wet guts on the ground. What other way would it be? Towards the road and civilization? Or deeper into the woods, away from the house, away from Guillory and the other cops—ever closer to a man with a bow and a grudge who’d planned this for a very long time.

  He set off running again.

  It never crossed his mind that Floyd and Kyle might not be together wherever the trail led. All thoughts of what lay behind the basement door were long gone.

  Chapter 49

  ‘IT’S NO GOOD,’ the guy with the wrecking bar said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  Guillory let him get out the way, then motioned for the guys with the battering ram to have a go. On the second try, aiming immediately above the hasp and padlock the door flew inwards, splitting vertically, revealing the steps leading down into the dank darkness. With the door hanging open, the rotten smell was dominant, overpowering the fetid dampness.

  Everybody knew it was only going to get worse.

  Guillory didn’t look around, hoped Evan stayed where he was at the back. She played the beam of her flashlight down the steps. There looked to be at lease twenty of them, green and slimy with algae. She ducked her head, still couldn’t see what lay at the bottom, the low ceiling cutting of her view.

  ‘I reckon it’s a well, alright,’ the same guy as before said.

  But it’s not just water that’s in it, Guillory thought to herself.

  She stood aside for a couple of guys to come forward with the cable and portable floodlight.

  ‘It’s not going to reach,’ one of them said, not meeting her eye.

  ‘We could bring the generator into the kitchen the other one said. Give us a few more feet.’

  It wasn’t worth it. She shook her head. They’d make do with the flashlights.

  ‘You want to go first,’ she said to a fit young guy called Sanchez.

  He nodded and took the flashlight from her, stepped onto the top step and looked for a handrail that wasn’t there.

  ‘Careful,’ Guillory said, ‘it looks slippery as hell. Maybe you need the—’

  Her words were cut off by a loud yell as Sanchez took another step down, slipped on the slick stone and went down on his ass. His arms flailed and the flashlight went flying, clattering down the rest of the steps.

  ‘Way to go, Sanchez,’ somebody called from the back.

  A rope was passed forward and Guillory threw the end to Sanchez, still on his ass, not keen to try to stand with nothing to hold on to. He caught the rope and pulled himself to his feet. She handed him another flashlight and he started down the stairs.

  When he was halfway, Guillory took hold of the rope and followed him down backwards, ducking slightly to keep her hair from brushing the low ceiling. She was surprised she didn’t hear Evan call out to tie the rope off on Ryder, then they could all go down on the rope at once. Maybe he’d gone up for some fresh air. She wished she could do the same, get rid of the churning in her gut.

  Sanchez had retrieved the flashlight he dropped by the time she got to the bottom. It still worked. He handed the other one back and she played it around the small room. It was about six feet square. The floor was damp dirt with a well in the middle, a retaining wall about a foot tall surrounding it. If Sanchez had slid all the way down the steps, they’d likely be hauling him out of the well before they found out what else was down there.

  The smell was much stronger down here, a smell she recognized far too vividly. The smell of death and decay. She closed her eyes and wished she was anywhere else.

  A piece of lumber lay across the low retaining wall, a rope tied around it, disappearing into the smelly blackness. She called up the steps for somebody else to come down and help Sanchez with the heavy lifting. She edged her way around to the back of the well to make enough room and shone her flashlight down the well.

  She couldn’t see a thing.

  She got down on her knees and laid the flashlight on the ground. Then she rested her left hand on the piece of lumber and took hold of the rope with her right. She gave a hard tug. It didn’t budge an inch. It sure as hell wasn’t just a rusty old bucket down there.

  The third guy joined them. They all looked at each other, nobody looking forward to the next five minutes. She nodded to them, get it over with, bile and dread inching up her throat.

  It was immediately obvious they couldn’t both get a good grip on the rope leaning over the well. The floor space in the small room was severely limited. There was no way they could back up the slippery stairs. Guillory called for another rope and they had to wait while someone ran outside to fetch it. The waiting was driving her crazy. She didn’t want to think what it must be like for Evan. She knew him well enough to know he’d already have arrived at the same conclusion she had.

  If he hadn’t left his car at Charlotte’s, Floyd would never have known of Kyle’s existence.

  She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d come slithering down the steps on his ass any minute, arms and legs flying everywhere, eyes wild with fear. She couldn’t even smile at the thought.

  Sanchez tied the second rope around the piece of lumber and shouted back up the steps for them to start hauling. He took hold of the rope and with the other guy, Rogers, fed and guided it, keeping it clear of the edge. Guillory shone her flashlight into the hole and prayed for a miracle.

  ‘I can see something,’ she said a minute later, a hollow feeling in her stomach as her prayer went unanswered.

  Sanchez and Rogers looked at her, not recognizing her voice.

  ‘Looks like somebody’s head,’ she said quietly, peering into the hole. ‘I can see dark brown hair. Can’t see what’s below that.’

  ‘Slow it down,’ Sanchez called up into the basement.

  Their heads met in a three-point star over the middle of the well as the rope inched through the two guys’ hands. The hair was clearly visible now, eight feet below them. Then a glimpse of dirty flesh, the skin waxy and unearthly in the wavering beam of the flashlight. Beyond that, the dark mass of the body filled the well, indistinguishable at first from the deeper blackness surrounding it. Then the white sleeves of a varsity jacket, caked with dirt and grime scraped from the sides of the well, almost ghostly as they emerged from the shadows.

  There was a sudden blur of movement. The beam of Guillory’s flashlight reflected b
ack from a pair of pink eyes, small and beady. With a startled squeal, a rat the size of a small dog leapt off the body onto the side wall of the well, its claws gripping the slimy surface.

  ‘Jesus,’ Sanchez said. ‘you see the size of that?’

  Then Guillory dropped her flashlight into the hole.

  Chapter 50

  EVAN KNEW HE’D HIT pay dirt as soon as he rounded the curve in the road. He’d followed the trail of blood and guts for a mile or so before the woods opened out into a wide clearing. On the far side, tight up against the trees was a boxy wooden structure about six-feet square mounted on stilts, lifting it eight-feet off the ground. A ladder was attached to one of the stilts, leading up to a door in the side. The whole thing was covered in dark green canvas, torn and faded in places. There were a couple of long vertical windows with shutters over them on each side.

  It was a deer blind, somewhere for hunters to hide while they waited for the unsuspecting deer to come along. Hence the capitalized BLIND in the text message. Floyd sure didn’t want to risk him walking straight past it.

  Kyle was inside, not down the well.

  And Floyd was hiding in the trees somewhere nearby. The hairs on the back of his neck rippled as he imagined Floyd lining up an arrow on the center of his back at this very moment. His hand went automatically to the small of his back, to get his gun. He changed his mind. It might be better for Floyd to think he was unarmed.

  He crept forward around the edge of the clearing, keeping his back to the trees, scanning the trees on the other side, his ears sensitive to every rustle, every scuffle in the undergrowth. Every tree he passed he half expected Floyd to step out and grab him from behind, to feel the gun in his pants snatched away and turned on him. Except his gut feeling, his base instincts, told him it wasn’t going to happen that way. Floyd favored a weapon more personal, more intimate, than the clinical efficiency of a bullet. Images of Vasiliev’s men, Floyd’s arrows ripping into their flesh, crowded his mind.

  He got to ten yards away from the blind and stopped, pressed himself further into the trees. He couldn’t say why. Floyd was either here or he wasn’t. And if he was, he’d watched Evan every step of the way, could have shot him at any time—it just wasn’t time yet.

  The silence of the clearing was suddenly shattered by his phone ringing.

  ***

  KYLE STOOD VERY STILL, gritted his teeth and tried not to cry like a big baby, as Uncle Evan would say. Never a dull moment with Uncle Evan around, no sir. Despite the circumstances he gave a small laugh—it wasn’t a sob—when he thought about some of the things his mom said about him when she thought he couldn’t hear.

  Kyle’s hands were tied behind his back, not so tight as to hurt, but tied just the same. It was no big deal, he’d been tied up worse by the bigger kids at school. The hood over his head was harder to deal with. It was smelly like old socks. And he hated—wasn’t scared of—the dark. It was the noose hanging loosely around his neck, a loop of heavy rope suspended halfway down his back, that made his legs shake uncontrollably, made him sure he was going to piss his pants.

  He was in a square wooden box on stilts, somewhere in the woods. The guy had thrown him over his shoulder and climbed up the ladder to get in as if he weighed nothing. Then the guy threw him in the corner and told him to keep his fucking mouth shut if he knew what was good for him.

  Kyle watched him with a mixture of fear and fascination as he fixed the end of the rope to a metal hook in the roof. He closed his eyes, concentrated hard on not being a big baby. In the end he had to open them again, see what he was doing next. There was some kind of trapdoor in the floor. The guy spent forever playing with it until he was happy with it, making it open and then closing it again. Over and over. Each time the trapdoor opened Kyle got a glimpse of the guy’s dog on the ground below them.

  It was one mean dog. When Max went to the big kennel in the sky, he’d like a dog like that. Wouldn’t give it a sissy name like Marlene though. Killer or Fang. That’s the sort of name you gave a dog like that. A name the dog would be proud of when you yelled for him across the park. The guy didn’t know shit.

  Then things got a whole lot scarier once the guy got the trapdoor the way he wanted it. That’s when the hood went on. He let out a whimper, didn’t think the guy heard. He was too busy talking to himself.

  When the guy made him stand up and he put the noose around his head he felt a surge of pee in his bladder. He held it, mouthed fuck you to the guy from behind the hood, felt better afterwards. Until the guy made him stand in the middle of the trapdoor.

  The guy squeezed his cheeks hard between his fingers through the hood and put his face right the other side of the thick cloth. Kyle smelled cigarettes on his breath, something on his fingers he couldn’t identify. Might have been wet dog. Or maybe raw meat.

  ‘You stand still, boy, you understand?’

  Kyle couldn’t talk, couldn’t even nod with the guy holding his face. He just squeaked, a big baby noise, and hated himself for it.

  ‘You move an inch and that there trapdoor’s gonna open. You know what happens then?’

  I’m not stupid, shit for brains.

  He managed an uh-huh.

  ‘Uncle Evan’s gonna be along real soon,’ the guy said and sniggered.

  Kyle thought it was a funny noise for a scary guy like him. And he was scary, with those tattoos—he reckoned they were prison tattoos—and his dog and his bow.

  Kyle tried what he hoped was a grim smile behind the hood, the one he practised in the bathroom mirror.

  Won’t do you no good. Uncle Evan’s gonna kick your sorry ass.

  ***

  EVAN SMILED TO HIMSELF as his phone rang, surprised it had taken this long for her to notice he was missing. Maybe now would be a good time to sit tight and wait for reinforcements. He was one hundred percent sure Kyle was inside the blind, one hundred and ten percent sure Floyd was waiting to shoot him when he was halfway up the ladder.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’ Guillory hissed.

  He filled her in quickly on where he was, how to get to him, told her about the deer blind.

  ‘Kyle’s in there, I know it.’

  She laughed, a short sharp cough.

  ‘Yeah, at least he wasn’t where you thought he was.’

  ‘What was the smell?’

  He scanned the trees constantly as they talked. If Floyd was hiding somewhere in them he’d have heard the phone ring, could hear what he was saying.

  ‘It was an old well. There was a rope hanging down it, something heavy on the end.’

  He wanted to shout down the phone, scream at her to just spit it out. She was too engrossed, reliving every dreadful moment.

  ‘I shone the flashlight down, still couldn’t see a thing, just the rope twisting, disappearing into the blackness. Then suddenly I saw a head—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m thinking Jesus Christ, Evan was right, it’s his nephew. Then this monster rat jumps off.’

  He heard her swallow, imagined her shuddering at the memory. He was sure Kyle was in the blind. His heart was thundering away in his chest, his throat tight, just the same. He needed her to confirm it.

  Just tell me.

  ‘It was a dead deer.’

  His shoulders relaxed, every muscle in his body suddenly weak.

  ‘The sick bastard put a rubber mask on its head, the sort of thing you get at a fancy dress store. And he’d fixed a toupée on top of that. He wanted us to see the head first, see the hair, think it was ...’

  She didn’t need to finish. He tried to imagine what she must have felt. Relief quickly turning to anger at being toyed with. Did Floyd have something similar planned for him? It was a useful lesson to learn—things are not necessarily what they seem.

  ‘Has Kyle got a blue and white varsity jacket?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. He never goes anywhere without it.’

  ‘He dressed the deer in it. Can you believe this sick bastard?’

>   He wouldn’t put anything past Floyd now. It made him doubt what he thought he knew. He looked at the deer blind again. Was Kyle really in there? That would be too easy, nothing to stop him sitting tight and waiting for backup. Or did Floyd have another message for him?

  ‘Was there a note?’

  ‘You’re getting to know this guy, eh?’

  He laughed, the sort of laugh makes you want to spit.

  ‘I feel like we’re joined at the hip. What did it say?’

  ‘There were two. Both pinned to Kyle’s jacket.’

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Okay, one and a half—the other half of the one he left in your car.’

  ‘Protect what you love ...’

  ‘Or lose it.’

  ‘Predictable. What about the other one?’

  She hesitated. Hesitation’s never good.

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘Is there a trapdoor in the deer blind?’

  ‘I can’t see from here. What does the note say?’

  ‘It says the trapdoor is on a timer.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘No. It says Deer aren’t the only thing you can hang.’

  Neither of them said a word for a long moment, then she spoke again.

  ‘The consensus here is your nephew has a noose around his neck and he’s standing on a trapdoor—a trapdoor on a timer.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘It doesn’t say.’

  ‘What? What’s the point of that?’

  And then it hit him. He knew exactly what the point was. Floyd didn’t want him to know. He wanted Evan to make a decision—a decision based on nothing but thin air and gut instinct that would determine whose life was forfeit.

  If he decided it was a bluff, he should sit tight and wait for Guillory and the backup to arrive. Slip back into the safety of the trees, not expose himself to Floyd. But if he was wrong, Kyle would pay the price for his bad call.

  If the timer was real—one with who knows how long, or short, a time to go—he had to make a move, right now, step out into the open, expose himself as he climbed the ladder to the blind. Floyd would pick him off as if he were shooting fish in a barrel, the trapdoor would open anyway ...