Being forced to earn her own living had freed Liv completely. Maybe she ate beans and ramen, and shopped in thrift stores, but at least she could breathe. Her mother wanted to love her, but compliance was the only fuel that could make that machine function. Liv’s refusal to comply was a refusal of her mother’s love. Period. A tragic dead-end.
She was startled to find herself sobbing under the stream of hot water. She thought she’d given up the fantasy of maternal acceptance years ago. She must still be grieving for it. Maybe she always would.
So she was on her own. No surprise. She had been for a long time. She’d just never been on the run from a killer on her own.
Brr. It made that lonely-bird-in-a-gilded-cage scenario look almost good by comparison. Almost. She didn’t have much money. Her credit cards were all maxed. Every penny she’d ever saved was sunk into Books & Brew. Her vehicle was evidence in a police investigation.
She had some jewelry she could pawn. She’d go to a resort town. Wait tables, work for tips. She’d contact the police when she got settled, ask for advice. There should be a system in place that might help her.
If she was going, it had to be soon. She stuck her head out the bedroom door. Still a low hum of activity downstairs. Not yet.
She packed and repacked her bags. Her main dilemma was her stash of unread novels. She finally tossed out a pair of jeans and a handful of underwear to make room for all of them. First things first.
Four o’clock found her, dressed and packed and vibrating with nerves, staring fixedly at the little clock on the bedside table.
She’d opted for jeans, schlumpy sandals. A plain blouse. She’d composed a careful note, apologizing and explaining as best she could.
The second hand ticked to four. Goodbye to life as she knew it.
She stuck her head out the door. It was utterly quiet.
She staggered down the corridor loaded like a donkey, lugging her purse, her laptop, her backpack, her suitcase. She made noise, but no one came bursting out to stop her.
Part of her must have been hoping someone would.
She left her bags by the back door and nicked the spare keys to her parents’ Volvo sedan. She would leave it in long term airport parking and mail the keys back to them. Now to slip past the police who were parked on both sides of the property. It felt disrespectful to their efforts to protect her, but there was nothing she could do.
She silently apologized to them in her head.
Fortunately there were enough hedges and foliage to plan a sneaky route down to the riverfront garage where the Volvo was parked. She’d had plenty of practice doing that as a girl, avoiding her mother’s eagle eye. No one should see her leave from there.
She disabled the back door alarm, and had a bad moment on the steps. Four AM was not a friendly time. The bushes looked like so many hunched, hungry animals lying in wait. She scurried and slunk, for a nervous, guilty eternity, as if she were doing something illicit and bad.
She finally made it, and heaved the garage door open. She started up the car, flipped off the headlights, and eased out onto the road in the moonlight. She picked up speed around the first curve, making plans as she went. A quick stop at the nearest bank to take whatever she could out of a cash machine, and then straight onto the highway—
Oh, Jesus. She screeched to a stop, just inches from the mud-spattered black Jeep parked crosswise across the road after the blind curve. Blocking both narrow lanes. Oh no, no. That was so wrong.
Terror jangled through every nerve, an awful blinding flash of exactly how brainless she’d been, how badly she’d underestimated—
The shadow sprang up. Thunk, an angular metal something punched through the window, scattering pebbles of shatterproof glass over her lap. Omigodomigod that is a gun screamed a faraway voice.
A black-gloved gorilla hand wrenched up the lock, released the door handle, plucked her out of the car and flung her onto the asphalt.
The thing squatted over her. Rough cut-outs in his black mask showed wide staring eyes. She sensed that he was smiling.
“Olivia.” His voice was an oily croon. “At last we meet.”
He clapped a cloth over her nose. She faded into nowhere.
The sky was heavy with bruised-looking clouds. Thunder growled, raising hackles on his back. Kev sat on his usual rock, but he wasn’t grinning. His hair stood practically on end. His torso was bare as always, taut with wiry muscle, but his skin was goosepimpled in the chill.
Sean pre-empted him, before he could start his usual rant.
“So? I’ve gotten off my dumb ass. Happy now?”
Kev’s eyes were haunted, shadowy. “Not yet. Move it faster.”
“Move what faster?” Sean snapped.
Kev’s eyebrow twitched up. “Your dumb ass.”
He lifted his arms. They were bound at the wrist with plasticuffs, so tightly that the plastic had cut deep into his flesh. Blood trickled in long rivulets down his muscular forearms, dripping off his elbows.
Sean woke with a start, knocking over his coffee. He stared around the office. It was lit only with the glow of the X-Ray Specs map grid. Cold coffee dripped onto his lap. He spun the chair back out of range. “Goddamnit, Kev,” he complained. “That was a dirty trick.”
He was shoving beacon paperwork out of the puddle when he saw the flash on the screen. Her icons were moving.
Then they stopped, and Sean stopped mopping coffee, muttering obscenities, feeling sorry for himself. He stopped breathing.
There was no reason for that car to stop. It was fifteen hundred meters from the driveway down to Endicott House. There were no traffic lights on that stretch of road. No crossroads. No driveways. Just an access to a long-abandoned logging track at the bottom of the valley.
The adrenaline in his system jolted up a few notches.
One of the icons detached itself, and began to move away from the others. He grabbed the phone, punched in Davy’s number.
“Sean? What the fuck?” His brother’s voice was grumpy, but clear. Davy always woke up sharp. A drowsy female voice murmured.
So Davy was sleeping with his wife again. Thank God for small favors. “Get your ass out of bed,” he said brusquely. “I don’t have a Specs monitor mounted in my truck, so you have to spot me.”
“Why? What’s going on? What’s the—”
“The beacons I planted last night. On Liv.” Impatience roughened his voice. “The group stopped on a blind curve on Chaeffer Creek Road. One of them just detached and wandered off into the river canyon.”
Davy considered this. “Could there be a logical explanation for this, other than the conclusion you have obviously leaped to?”
“What? That she stopped in her limo a klom from her daddy’s driveway at four in the morning, and wandered into the woods to take a piss? Get real! Is the computer booting?”
“Yeah, yeah. Calm down. Program’s loading.”
“You ready for the codes? Oh, fuck me. The icon’s moving faster. She’s in a car, on that old logging road. Maybe the guy has an offroad vehicle. Can you take the code? I’ve got to get off this fucking phone! I’ve got to move! My cell won’t work until I’m on the other side of the Bluffs.”
“Give it to me,” Davy said tersely.
He recited the code of the icon. “I’ve got a handheld in my kit, but she’ll be out of range by the time I get to Chaeffer Canyon.”
“It’s rough country,” Davy said. “He could go up over Long Prairie, or turn left and head to Orem Lake. OK, I got her. Moving south, at fifteen miles an hour.” He paused. “That, uh, sucks.”
“Right.” He flung the phone down and sprinted out the door for the Jeep. Tires spat gravel as the vehicle bounded over the driveway. “I’m hanging up. Make the calls.”
“What calls?”
“Christ, Davy, do I have to tell you everything? Call her folks, call the cops, call the state troopers, call the goddamn National Guard!”
“Calm down,” Davy soothed. “Do yo
u have to show your hand already? Get to where the rest of the beacons are, see what you find. Make sure you’ve got a genuine situation before you blow this thing completely out of the water. I don’t want to visit you in jail.”
“Who cares if I go to jail?” Sean bellowed. “This is Liv’s life!”
“I care,” Davy said grimly. “God help me, but I do. Hang in there. She’s headed south, if she’s in that car. Call me when you get there.”
This was a hell of a time for his combat cool to desert him. Sean usually snapped into a state of utter calm when bullets started to fly. Not worrying whether he lived or died freed up a guy’s concentration to an amazing extent. But this was way different. Christ, this was Liv.
The only thing that would calm him down would be ripping the steaming guts out of this piece of of dogshit with his own hands.
The road sped beneath his wheels. He screeched to a stop at the canyon road, leaped out. Sprinted along the shoulder.
The sight hit him like a fist in the belly. A black sedan, its crumpled nose crunched against a tree at the bottom of the canyon.
He dove over the edge, slipped and slid down the gravel, struggled through the bushes. He was making guttural, animal noises, seeing Kev’s charred body, flames dancing in twisted black metal, the—
No. He could not wig out yet. Not til he knew the worst.
He reached the car, peered inside.
Empty. Oh, God. No bodies, no blood. Just the contents of Liv’s purse, scattered over the backseat. He started to cry, like a little kid.
He dashed tears away as he punched in Davy’s number, crawling back up the hill with desperate, slip-sliding haste.
“Yeah?” Davy asked. “So?”
He scrambled over the top, leaped into his truck. “Make the calls. Someone pitched the car into the canyon. Liv’s gone. Where’s the icon?”
“Halfway to Orem Lake. Moving steadily at fifteen miles an hour.”
He topped the rise that led down the rough logging track. “Make the calls, Davy. If this guy wastes me, you have to help them find her.”
“Do not say shit like that!” Davy snarled. “You’re armed, right?”
“Not really, but too bad for me. Whatever.” He stepped on the gas.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. “Rise and shine, babydoll.”
Liv struggled slowly to the surface at the banging sound, the summoning voice. She was afraid to open her eyes. Something terrible was waiting for her. She could feel it, crouching. Waiting to leap out.
She opened her eyes, and it all rushed back, together with a crippling jolt of fear. She locked her jaw to stifle the whimpering.
Her wrists burned. They were bound with hard plastic strapping, like the ratcheted tie on a heavy duty garbage bag. There was tape over her mouth. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream, could barely breathe.
It was dark. Faint light filtered in, from a small, dirty window. From jagged cracks in the rough plank walls. The place stank of rot, mildew, and the sharp odor of fresh plastic tarp.
“Right on schedule,” said a rasping voice.
She jerked her head around, staring wild-eyed at the hooded nightmare looming over her. She could smell his sharp, skunklike musk from the ground. He was holding a big, ugly hammer.
He leaned over her body, and swung the hammer against the wall above her, bam. She twisted to look. A nail. That could not be good.
“OK, darling. Let’s get you into position.” He grabbed her bound wrists, jerking her up with a force that almost dislocated her shoulders, and hauled her back against the wall, then stretched her arms up and hooked the plastic cuffs over the thick nail sunk into the two-by-four.
“Now hold real still, babydoll. Or I’ll mash your fingers into jam.”
Bang. She tried not to flinch as he swung the hammer one more time, bending the head of the nail up into a cruel hook.
He sat down cross-legged next to her. The position was surreally casual and friendly. He patted her leg, and peeled off his leather gloves.
“Am I too scary with the mask?” He yanked it off. “Is this better?”
Oh, no, it was not better. It was so very much not better, that he had no intention of leaving her in any condition to identify him. Her head throbbed, her stomach churned. There was a flat, metallic taste in her mouth, from whatever he had drugged her with.
She had never seen this man. He was in his mid-forties, barrel chested as a comic book villain. His shoulders and arms were swollen with muscle, his belly thick with fat. He wore an overly tight black T-shirt. His face might have been beefcake handsome when he was younger, but it had coarsened, puffy under the eyes, skin pitted, broken veins. The way he looked at her body made her curl into a ball.
“Oh, no, sweetheart.” He pushed up her blouse ’til his fingers found warm, shrinking skin. He pulled out a wicked looking knife.
Liv’s blood froze. His shiny lips stretched out over big teeth. “We need to talk.” His tone was conversational. She stared at him, blinking.
He laughed. “Oops. I forgot all about that little detail.” He grabbed the tape on her mouth and ripped it off.
Air hit her dry throat, making her cough and hack. She barely recognized the thin, high, quavering voice as her own. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one who asks the questions.” He touched her face with the tip of his knife, tracing patterns on her cheekbone.
She stared, hypnotized, at the blade. It tickled. Her mind raced. What could she know that would interest him? She was a librarian, for God’s sake. A would-be bookseller. What could she say that would keep her alive long enough to hope for rescue?
Yeah, right. She had organized her own doom, sneaking away hours before anyone might sound the alarm. “What do you want? Did you send the e-mails? And burn my store? And set that bomb?”
“Of course. Who else loves you so much?” His voice had a singsong lilt. “Don’t bother screaming. There’s no one around for miles.”
“You were watching me?” She tried to swallow. “This morning?”
“I’ve been watching you for weeks,” he said. “It was all so easy. You sneaky girl. You crept off all alone. Silly Olivia. I put pressure switches under all the car seats. I knew the second you got into that car. I thought of everything, you see. It’s because I care so much.”
His friendly tone was a bizarre contrast to the senseless things he said. “Listen up, babydoll. We have to be brisk, if we want time for the passionate physical encounter that I’ve been dreaming of.” He giggled when she cringed away from him. “I love it when they play hard to get.”
“What do you want to know?” she whispered.
He pressed the tip of the knife under her ear. She stared at his knife hand, frozen. “Where are the tapes?” he asked.
She blinked, utterly blank. “Tapes?”
The knife broke the skin. A bead of blood trickled down her neck. Hot, slow and ticklish. “It’s not in your best interests to play dumb.”
“I swear, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The man heaved a theatrical sigh. “Tell me what McCloud told you. Tell me about his notebook. What was in it, where it went.”
“McCloud? I haven’t seen Sean for fifteen years, and he didn’t—”
Whack. The slap made her ears ring. “Not Sean. The other one. His brother. Don’t be thick, Olivia. It makes me angry. I’m being sweet and gentle now. You wouldn’t like to see me angry. Trust me on this.”
“I don’t know his brothers! Davy and Con are both older than him. They’d already left town when I met Sean, so I never even—”
Slap, slap, an openhand and a sharp backhand batted her head back and forth. Her eyes flooded with tears. “Not them.” The fake friendliness was gone from his voice. “The other brother.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “You mean…Sean’s twin? Kev?” she faltered. “But Kev—Kev’s dead.”
“Twin?” The knife lifted away. “They were twins?”
“Y-y-
yes,” she said, teeth chattering. “Identical.”
“Hmm. Interesting. They didn’t look like twins.”
She was pathetically grateful to have given him something he wanted, but the reprieve was all too brief.
“Kevin McCloud told you where he hid the tapes,” he said. “I had you in my rifle scope. I saw that son-of-a-bitch hand you that notebook. I never forget a face. Particularly not a pretty one.”
His words blew her mind wide open and three hundred and sixty degrees around with their terrible implications. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You’re talking about fifteen years ago? Those guys chasing Kev, trying to kill him…it was all true?”
“You know damn well it’s true,” the man snarled. “We didn’t know your name, or I would have taken care of you then. And that stubborn fuck Kevin never told us dick, no matter what we did to him. And we were creative. You would not believe the crazy shit we tried on that kid.”
Her mind shied away in horror from the images his words invoked. “You tortured Kev?” she whispered. “Oh, my God.”
He gave her a mock bow. “C’est moi. Then I saw you on TV. Remember that interview about your bookstore? You must have been feeling pretty confident, hmm? Must have thought I’d given up.”
“My God,” she whispered helplessly.
He plucked at the buttons of her blouse with the tip of his knife. They popped off, the shirt gaping. “Where did he hide those tapes?”
“I—I don’t know anything about any tapes—”
“I’ll start with your ear.” The knife dug in beneath her earlobe. “I’m sorry to get you all bloody before we play, but if you insist—”
“No! Please! He stopped me outside the library,” she quavered.
“What did he tell you?”
She squeezed her eyes shut, struggled to remember. “He said…he said someone was trying to kill him. He didn’t say who.”
“And the notebook he gave you? What did you do with it?”
Liv hesitated, her body vibrating with stark fear.
“I don’t need to worry about fingerprints, or genetic material,” he murmured, almost idly. “They’ll never find your body. There’s a plastic tarp to catch the mess. I’ll wrap up what’s left of you after I’m done. Tuck you in a nice, deep, wormy hole. It’s all ready for you.”
Edge Of Midnight (The Mccloud Series Book 4) Page 15
