by Mark Lukens
Jake smiled like he understood. He looked at Lita and nodded his head.
She pulled the trigger twice and two bullets spit into Gary’s head before he had a chance to beg them not to shoot.
3.
Ryan pulled up into Carol’s driveway. He parked his car and turned off the engine and the headlights. He noticed that only one car was parked under the wood awning – Carol’s car. He wondered where Victor or Tom was, but he didn’t really care. He looked at Carol’s house and noticed that the house was dark – there didn’t seem to be any lights on inside. He wondered for a moment if the electricity was out from the storm, but then he glanced around at the other houses and saw that they all had their lights burning. No, he realized that there might be a different reason the lights were off. He thought Carol might know more than she was letting on. He thought Carol might be waiting for them.
And then another thought occurred to him. Maybe those two at Gary’s house were inside waiting.
But Gary didn’t know where he lived; Amber had assured him of that.
There were no other vehicles parked on the street. Still, he had to be careful when they went inside.
He looked at Amber.
“We need to hurry up to my room,” he told her.
She nodded.
“We’ll get the money and get out of here.”
Again she nodded. She was ready.
They got out of his car and raced across the lawn as the rain pelted them. They got onto the front porch and hurried to the front door. Ryan unlocked the door and they entered the house. He closed and locked the front door. He also locked the deadbolt and attached the security chain.
Ryan stood still for a moment in the darkness. There was a flickering light coming from down the hall, coming from Carol’s den. It seemed like light from a candle – like the same light he’d seen before from down the hall.
He pointed at the stairs that led up to the second story, and Amber nodded.
They crept up the stairs to the hallway.
Ryan unlocked the door to his bedroom and they rushed inside.
4.
From down the hall, Victor watched them enter through the crack in his barely open door. He had expected Ryan to be alone, not with a woman. He sighed … this was going to be a little more complicated than he thought. But it still had to be done.
Victor slipped out of his bedroom and crept down the hall. He held his breath as he snuck past Ryan’s bedroom door. His heart thundered so hard in his chest he was sure Ryan and the woman would hear it.
He made his way down the stairs, painfully slow, skirting the creaky part of the steps, glancing every few seconds back up at the top of the stairs to make sure they hadn’t come back out of the bedroom.
Once he was on the ground floor, he moved quickly across the living room towards the couches and chair. He ducked down behind the couch and pulled his revolver out of his pants pocket. He waited in the gloom.
He had seen the flickering light coming from Carol’s den. She was in there. Praying to that pentagram on her floor. Doing whatever ritual she imagined would send Cutter back. Maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn’t. But Victor was only going to keep his mind on one thing, and that was protecting Carol. He would wait here and if Ryan made a move towards Carol’s den, then he was going to have to shoot him.
5.
Inside his bedroom, Ryan locked his door and shoved the skeleton key down into his pocket. He rushed over to the bed; he picked up the mattress and tossed it off of the bed. And underneath was the layer of money on the box-spring.
Amber walked over to the bed, her eyes wide with disbelief as she stared down at the layer of money, the stacks of hundred dollar bills sealed in plastic.
“You weren’t lying,” she whispered.
“I’m not lying about any of this,” he told her. “In the closet, there’s an empty duffel bag.”
She got the duffel bag out of the closet and they began filling the bag up with the money.
6.
Jake had made better time than he thought. He pulled the Lincoln over on the side of the road half a block away from Carol’s house and cut the headlights. He shut the engine off and pocketed the car keys. He saw Ryan’s Impala parked in the driveway.
Jake and Lita glanced in the backseat at Mr. Murdock who nodded at them.
All three of them got out of the car and stood in the rain which had slowed to a drizzle for a moment. They shut their doors quietly and then ran down the sidewalk to Carol’s driveway. They checked Ryan’s car – no one inside. From Ryan’s car, they split up and ran off in different directions.
Lita took the front door.
She ran onto the front porch and snuck across the floorboards, barely making a sound. She tested the front door handle with her gloved hand – it was locked. She pulled a lock pick from her pocket and went to work on the door. This one should be easy to pick, she thought, but she was having a difficult time with it.
She knew Jake and Mr. Murdock went to the back of the house. And at the rate she was going, she thought they would be inside the house before her.
Jake worked the lock on a back door as Mr. Murdock continued on past him towards the large trees in the backyard. He waited there for a moment by one of the large trees, the one closest to the house. He looked up at the branches that reached out towards a second story window.
Mr. Murdock tucked his gun inside his suit coat and began climbing the tree up towards the window.
7.
Ryan zipped up the duffel bag full of money and handed it to Amber.
She stared at him. “What are you doing?”
“Take the money,” he told her. “They’re all unmarked bills. Untraceable. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.”
“But what about you? You said you were coming with me.”
“I will. We can meet up somewhere.”
“Why? What are you planning to do here?”
“Amber,” he begged. “We don’t have time for this. You need to leave. Wait for me at the park tomorrow morning. I’ll be there.” But he wasn’t so sure that was the truth. He just needed her to be out of the house. He needed her to be safe. “If I’m not there, then you take the few possessions you want out of your house and you leave town. Promise me you’ll do that.”
“I’m not leaving without you, Ryan,” she said. “Whatever it is that you think you need to do here, just forget it. Let it go. We can just leave. Leave it all behind us.”
Ryan was about to tell her that these people would never stop looking for him, but then the words dried up in his mouth.
He froze.
They both heard a noise from downstairs, the sound of someone moving around down there in the darkness.
“Shit,” Ryan hissed. “They’re already here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
1.
Ryan looked at Amber and spoke to her in a low but hurried voice. “Listen to me; you need to find somewhere to hide in here. Wait until I come back to get you. You understand?”
She nodded.
Ryan glanced at the closet. “Over there, hide in the closet.”
Amber got in the closet with the duffel bag in her hands and Ryan pushed the clothes back towards her. He could still see her. He got a blanket down from the shelf on top of the closet and draped it over her and tried to make it look as natural as possible. It would have to do, he thought.
He closed the closet doors almost all the way shut and then he left the bedroom.
He rushed down the stairs and looked at the living room for a moment. He didn’t see anybody in the living room. He glanced down the hall and he could still see the flickering light from Carol’s den. But that didn’t mean she was in the den – it could be a trick.
A noise from near the kitchen grabbed his attention. He hurried through the dining room, and then into the kitchen, and then into the laundry room.
2.
Jake picked the lock on the back door and got into the house thr
ough a mud room that also served as a laundry room. He closed the door quietly and stopped and listened, making sure he didn’t hear any sounds. His gun was still shoved down in the waistband of his pants, but he could get to it quickly if he needed to.
He took a step and then stopped. He heard a noise from behind him – a soft noise.
He turned and Ryan seemed to materialize out of the darkness in front of him.
Jake grabbed his gun out of the waistband of his pants, but he never got the chance to shoot. Ryan grabbed Jake’s wrist and squeezed. Jake felt all of the strength run out of his hand, it suddenly felt numb and useless. The gun slipped out of his fingers and dropped to the floor with a dull thud. He stared in horror at Ryan’s blue eyes. There was no way Ryan could be this strong, Jake thought.
As Ryan crushed the man’s wrist, he saw the handle of a knife poking out from a holster inside his suit coat. A big knife. He had planned on shooting the man, but this would work much better. In a lightning movement, Ryan grabbed the hunting knife out of the holster and stabbed the man in the gut.
Jake felt the white-hot searing pain of his own knife’s blade ripping into his abdomen. He felt the blade slice up underneath his ribcage, cutting through muscle and organs. His body went limp and much like his hand had done, he lost control of his muscles. He felt Ryan helping him down gently to the floor.
Jake wrapped his fingers around the handle of his knife that was still stuck in his gut. He tried to pull at it, but it felt like the tip of the knife was imbedded in bone somewhere inside his body. His fingers loosened on the knife and he felt everything around him slipping away.
He lay on the floor, curled up in a fetal position as the blood drained out of his body. He started to feel very cold.
3.
Carol knelt in her den, right in the middle of the pentagram painted on her wood floor. The candles burned and cast their flickering light. She had her eyes closed for a moment, whispering the chants she had learned from Walter. She opened her eyes and stared at the jar at the top of the pentagram, the jar in front of Ryan’s suitcase, the jar with her husband’s head floating in it.
One of the candles blew out even though there was no breeze in the room.
Then another one went out.
She heard footsteps behind her in the darkness.
And there was a sound that she had heard before, the sound she had heard when she had prayed a few days ago and knew that he was coming. But at the time she thought it was her husband coming back to her, now she knew she’d been wrong.
But maybe she hadn’t been wrong. Maybe her husband had come back, only Cutter, his executioner, had somehow come back with him.
The dripping sound continued from behind her.
She had done a terrible thing, she knew that now. But could it be mended? Could she fix it somehow?
She stared at the face in the jar. The last flickering candle that hadn’t been blown out sent shadows dancing all around her. “Is that you?” she whispered.
There was no answer from behind her, only the dripping sound.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have called you back. I made a mistake. I want you to go back now.”
It felt like the person was right behind her now; she could feel cold breath on the back of her neck and in her ear. She could smell a rotting odor. “It doesn’t work that way, my sweet Carol,” the voice whispered into her ear.
Carol shuddered. The voice sounded different, a little slurred because of the wounds to his mouth, but she recognized it – it was her husband’s voice.
But she didn’t want to turn around; she didn’t want to see him. What would she see? Would he even have a face anymore?
“I just want to make it better,” Carol cried.
She felt the brush of fingertips on the side of her neck, and the fingertips were wet and pulpy. “There is one way you can make things better,” he whispered into her ear. “There’s one thing you can do.”
And the last candle blew out.
4.
It seemed to Amber like she’d been hiding in the closet for hours now, but she knew that wasn’t true. She thought she’d heard a sound, like glass breaking and then something opening. She couldn’t tell if it came from the bedroom or from downstairs; the stormy weather outside made the noises hard to pinpoint. Maybe it was Ryan. Maybe he had come back for her. She expected to hear him whispering from right outside the closet door that everything was okay and that she could come out. They could leave now.
But Ryan never whispered to her, and she didn’t hear any more noises in the bedroom. But she heard a few thumps and other noises that she thought came from downstairs.
What was Ryan doing? Was he going to try and kill these people who were after his money?
It was her money now, her mind whispered.
No, it was their money now.
She couldn’t take it anymore. She pushed the blanket off of her. It was too hot underneath the blanket and she felt like she couldn’t breathe. She stood up and ducked under the line of hanging clothes as she moved to the closet doors. She pushed the door open just a crack, she just wanted to make sure that Ryan wasn’t in the room.
She poked her head out into the dark room and looked around. She didn’t see anything in the darkness. She stepped all the way out of the closet with the duffel bag gripped in her hand.
She could hear the scratching sounds from the branches of the tree right outside the bedroom window, the scraping of wood against the glass, but it sounded different. The rain sounded louder.
She looked at the bedroom window.
It was wide open and there was a hole in the glass like someone had punched a hand through it.
And there were wet footprints that led from the window across the wood floor.
Amber was about to run out of the room, but then a flash of lightning outside the bedroom window lit up the room for a split second and she saw a large man standing by the bedroom door. He was dripping wet from the rain and he was dressed in black clothes and gloves. He was so dark it was like he blended in with the shadows. He held a gun in his gloved hand and it was aimed right at her.
Amber stifled a scream as she clutched the duffel bag, suddenly paralyzed with fear.
Mr. Murdock moved towards her and smiled. “Going somewhere, sweetie?”
5.
Lita finally got the front door unlocked. She’d never had this much trouble with a lock before – it seemed like something was keeping the lock from opening, but she pushed that thought from her mind. She opened the door and slipped inside. She locked the front door again, but she kept her back to the door and her eyes on the dark room. She saw an archway to the right that looked like it led to a bedroom or something, and an archway to the left that might lead to a dining room and kitchen.
She made herself stand still for a few more moments in the darkness, letting her eyes adjust to the room, scanning every corner to make sure no one was hiding. She had her gun in her hand – the silencer was still attached.
She moved forward through the darkness, heading for the stairs. She would check the archway to the right first, then the one to the left, before going up the stairs. She was sure she would run into Jake and Mr. Murdock soon.
As she walked towards the couch she sensed rather than heard someone coming for her. She spun around and saw an old man with a gun in his hand. He had it pointed at her.
“Put the gun down,” he said in a low voice.
Lita stood still; she was only a few feet away from the man. But he didn’t look like he was going to back down. She crouched down and set her gun on the wood floor.
“Kick it over there by the couch,” he told her.
She kicked her gun over to the couch with the toe of her boot. The gun slid across the floor, right past the couch towards the archway that led to Carol’s bedroom and den.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“We just want Ryan,” Lita said as she took a step towards him.
; “That’s far enough,” Victor said.
Lita studied the man and saw him relaxing just a bit now that she didn’t have her gun anymore. She smiled at him. “You let us take Ryan and then we’re out of here.”
Victor hesitated.
“Why are you after him?” he asked her.
Instead of answering, Lita glanced to her left, like she’d just heard or seen something. It was a trick she’d used before, not too exaggerated, just enough to get the old man to glance that way.
And he did.
She only needed one second. She dove at Victor and plowed him back into the wall. He landed with a thud and she heard the satisfactory sound of his gun clattering to the floor and sliding across the wood.
She backed away from him as he bent forward, trying to catch his breath, and then she kicked Victor in his side with the toe of her boot before he even had a chance to move. He collapsed down onto the floor behind the two recliners.
Victor grunted as the air rushed from his body. An intense pain exploded in his side – he guessed that she had broken some of his ribs with that kick. Before he could think of too much else, the toe of her boot came out of the darkness and collided with his face.
Stars exploded in his field of vision and the pain was so sudden and intense that he nearly passed out.
Lita squatted down beside Victor and shoved the muzzle of his own gun against his temple. She glanced around to make sure no one had come running from the sound of their fighting. But the sound of the pouring rain masked a lot of the noise.
And this puzzled her. She was sure that Jake was in the house by now, but maybe he wasn’t; maybe he was having just as tough of a time as she had with these old but sturdy locks.
“Where’s Ryan?” she asked Victor.
Victor stared up at Lita, but he didn’t answer her. He struggled for breath from his cracked ribs, and he could hear his wheezing breaths in his own ears.
