by S W Vaughn
Lobo’s bike handled well, and Jude made the trip from Victory Falls to Providence Forge in fifteen minutes flat. His first stop was Danica’s place and his car. It was still there, untouched like he figured. These bastards were too careful to leave anything incriminating.
But they needed to work on finishing what they started. If they’d bothered to beat him all the way to death instead of halfway, they might’ve actually stopped him.
He parked the bike behind the Camry, slid behind the wheel of the car and grabbed his phone. They’d taken everything he had on him — keys, wallet, bifold and gun. The Department of Criminal Justice Services up in Richmond was going to love him if he came back for a replacement license so soon.
The phone had only charged back up to about one-third power, but he just needed to make one call. He punched in directory assistance, had them dial him through to the Providence Forge sheriff’s station, and waited.
A woman with an unfamiliar voice answered. Lisa Copeland must’ve gone home for the night. “Hi there,” Jude said to the voice. “I need to speak with Sheriff Singer.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but the sheriff isn’t in right now,” the woman said. “If this is an emergency, I can connect you to 911.”
“No thank you, ma’am. I just need the sheriff,” he said. “You’re dispatch, right? Can you patch me through to his home number?”
The woman paused, and then said, “I can’t do that. I can take a message, or you can call back in the morning when he’s in.”
“I really think you should patch me through. He’s going to want to hear this.”
“Hear what, sir?” she said, sounding exasperated.
“Well, ma’am, I just killed a man. And I’m willing to turn myself in, but only if it’s directly to the sheriff.”
She stammered something incoherent. “Are you serious?” she finally breathed.
“As a heart attack, ma’am.”
“Sweet Lord. All right, I’ll patch you through.”
There was a series of clicks, the hum of an open line. Two rings and the sheriff answered with, “Singer residence, Andy speaking.”
“Hey, Sheriff. It’s Jude Wyland,” he said. “Remember that gang I told you about?”
“Why the hell are you calling my house, Wyland?”
“Because I just murdered the gang’s leader and stole his motorcycle.”
“What?” Singer roared.
“Come to Sherry Price’s old house and I’ll tell you all about it,” he said. “Bring backup. Do not call Teddy Armstrong, or you get nothing.”
“Damn it, Wyland, I want an explanation!”
“Well, you know where to find it.”
He ended the call, popped the trunk and got out, tucking the phone in his pocket. He’d thought of another use for it after all. Richie’s care package was still where he left it beneath a duffel bag of clothes and an emergency blanket. He uncovered it, dug through and found the night vision goggles. Then he headed for the bike.
Hang in there, Danica. I’m coming.
If there was a darker place than the labyrinthine basement beneath Sherry’s house, Jude couldn’t think of one.
When he arrived, the house was dark and silent, but there was an unfamiliar car in the driveway. Hopefully it was Quinton’s. He left the bike out front and made his way to the back of the house with Lobo’s gun drawn and ready. Around back, he thought there was a faint glow washing the inside of the block glass windows set into the foundation. Of course, it could be just his desperation making him see things.
If he was wrong about this place, he had no chance of saving Danica. No idea where else she might be.
He took a minute to open an app on his phone and prayed the battery would last a little longer as he replaced it in a pocket. The back door was locked, but the ground floor window to the left of it slid open. He climbed through and pressed against the wall of a small mudroom, catching his breath as his vision slowly adjusted. Once he could make out vague shapes, he slipped the night vision goggles in place and turned them on. Shades of green swam into being.
He moved quietly, listening for any sound, thankful he more or less remembered where the entrance to the basement was. The house remained silent, and the basement door was unlocked.
When he opened it, he heard a low, steady rush of air — like the basement was constantly exhaling. Nothing else yet. But when he briefly lifted the goggles from his eyes he saw a definite glow, faint but steady, somewhere beyond the shadowed depths of the stairs.
He went down slow and started through the basement, following the general direction of the light. Through stone-walled rooms, past small caches of tools and Halloween decorations gathering dust. Eventually he heard something other than the echoes of air moving through the rooms and tunnels.
A woman sobbing.
He slowed as he closed in on the sound, stopped when the light ahead grew bright enough to interfere with the night vision. When he took the goggles off and pocketed them, he saw a yellow glow spilling from a wide, arched opening ahead and to the left. The sound came from there.
A flash of recollection came to him, and he remembered what was beyond that opening. It had been the witch room. Sherry always decorated it like a haunted forest and rigged a full-sized dummy witch on a broomstick to pop out of the deep, dry stone cistern at the back of the space.
He pressed against the wall next to the opening and peered through. The room was bare now, save for real cobwebs and the woman who looked like Sherry Price sitting on the lip of the stone well. The sobbing came from the hole behind her.
Danica.
“Shut up, will you?” the woman said abruptly. “This is your own fault. I told you to leave me alone.”
Jude had heard enough.
He swung around and strode through the archway, gun first. The woman glanced up, started to smile, but then her mouth fell open in shock. “Mr. Oliver?” she gasped.
That threw him for a few seconds, until he remembered that was the name he’d given her at the county building. “Not exactly,” he said. “But then, you’re not exactly Sherry Price. Are you, Karen?”
Her face drew into a mask of fury. “How the hell…”
“Who’s there?” The voice floating from the cistern was shaken but determined. “Oh my God. Jude, is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” He gestured with the gun. “Hands up and move away,” he said to Karen. “Now.”
She complied slowly, standing with her hands raised to step aside. “Whoever you are, you’re a dead man,” she spat.
“People keep telling me that. But I’m still breathing.” Jude moved toward the cistern, keeping the weapon trained on the woman. “Danica,” he called. “You okay?”
“I think my leg is broken. And she’s … oh, God, she’s down here, Jude.” Her voice wavered and broke on a fresh sob. “Aunt Sherry. They killed her and left her down here, all this time.”
His heart wrenched sharply. The sick bastards had thrown her into a hole with a corpse. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.”
“Is she, really?”
The male voice was behind him. Before he could react, a too-familiar sensation pressed against the back of his head — the muzzle of a gun.
Chapter 21
“Quinton,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Mr. Wyland. You don’t look as dead as you’re supposed to be.” A hand reached around, plucked the gun from him and tossed it to a smug Karen, who caught it neatly. “I guess I’ll have to remedy that myself.”
“Jude, what’s happening?” Danica called breathlessly.
He stiffened. “Nothing. It’s fine.”
“You shouldn’t lie to a lady.” Karen inspected the gun briefly, then walked over and pointed it down the well. “Let me shoot her now. She screwed everything up.”
“Nothing is screwed up,” Quinton said in a firm tone. “I told you, we need her so we can find out who else knows. But we don’t need him.”
The gun pushed harder against him. “Do we, Mr. Wyland?”
“I suppose we don’t,” he ground out. He could only disarm one of them before the other one took a shot, at either him or Danica. “So now what? You shoot me and dump me in the well?” he said. “Sounds like it’s getting a little crowded down there.”
“Actually, you’ve given me a way out of all this,” Quinton said.
“Oh. You’re going to frame me, like you framed Martin Lunn.”
In response, a fist pounded his kidney and left him gasping. Bastard hit hard for a politician. “Yes, something like that,” he said. “Everyone around here knows you’re unbalanced. You’ve proven that. And no one will blame me when I shoot you in self-defense, after you broke into my colleague’s house with your insane accusations that she’s not Sherry Price.”
Karen laughed. “Oh, my. I’ll be so rattled and distraught,” she cooed. “Especially when my dear niece goes missing … and it turns out this wild man murdered her.”
“Don’t you touch him, you bitch!” Danica shouted.
Quinton gave a cold laugh. “Save your breath, dear. You’ll need it to scream when I’m finished with your boyfriend.” The pressure of the gun increased again. “Turn around and start walking. We’ll do this upstairs,” he said. “You come along too, Karen. You can give him some self-defense wounds before I shoot him.”
“Fantastic,” the woman purred.
Jude walked. When he passed through the archway, a flashlight switched on behind him and lit the way. “You really need some smarter thugs,” he said as he moved back the way he’d come, toward the stairs. “Lobo talked too much.”
“So do you. Shut up.”
He shrugged and kept going. “So what was the plan?” he said. “Murder everyone who refused to move out of the east side? Put up more shoddy buildings and milk the properties until they burn flat, too?”
“The plan is to make millions, and it’s still intact. You’re only an inconvenience.”
“Hey, we’ve all got hobbies,” Jude said. “Mine is being inconvenient.”
“What a shame that your skills have reached a plateau.”
When they reached the stairs, Quinton reached out and flipped a switch. Light flooded the stairwell. “Get up there,” Quinton said. “I’ll be far enough behind that you can’t reach me, but close enough to put a bullet in you if you so much as think about turning around.”
“Got it.”
Jude started up, moving as slow as he dared. Unfortunately, Quinton wasn’t stupid. His best shot now was that Sheriff Singer had somehow managed to get his stubborn old ass in gear and was on the way, or already here. Barring that, his backup play was to turn on them in the stairwell, take a bullet and hope it didn’t hit any vital organs or incapacitate him before he could knock them both down the stairs.
The chances of surviving Plan B were minimal at best.
He reached the door at the top and stopped. “Open it,” Quinton said behind him.
He did. And in the darkness, he saw ghostly flickering red-and-blue lights filtering to the kitchen from the front of the house. With the strong light in the stairwell, Quinton couldn’t see the weaker flashes yet.
“Move out into the room,” Quinton said. “Five steps. If I hear any more, I’ll shoot.”
Jude grimaced and made a show of stomping forward five times. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” he called back. “Why don’t you toss me that gun, and I’ll shoot myself? Save you the trouble of pulling the trigger.”
“I believe I can handle that, Mr. Wyland.”
“If you say so.”
He waited, holding his breath. Footsteps closed in behind him. Just as he heard Karen’s lighter tread on the top few stairs, there was a tremendous cracking sound from the front of the house. They’d broken the door in.
Jude pivoted on a heel and tackled Quinton to the floor, driving his arm up just as his finger tightened on the trigger. The discharge was thunder-loud in the space, and the bullet hit the ceiling, raining chunks of acoustic tile down over them. “In here, Sheriff!” Jude shouted.
“Get this lunatic off me!” Quinton screamed, his face twisting in fury as he let the gun clatter to the floor. “He just tried to shoot me!”
Karen’s eyes widened. She whirled and ran back down the stairs.
“No! Goddamn it,” Jude snarled. He scrambled back, hauled Quinton up and slammed him against the wall. “If your puppet kills Danica, I will end your sorry life. Hear me?”
Ronnie Quinton started laughing.
“Don’t move!” Sheriff Singer’s voice boomed into the room before he rounded the entrance to the kitchen with three deputies in tow. None of them were Armstrong. At least he’d gotten that right. “Wyland, let him go,” the sheriff said, swinging the revolver in his hand at him.
“Fine. You arrest him, then.” Jude pulled his phone out, laid it on the island counter behind him and slid it in the sheriff’s direction. Looked like there was just enough battery left to play the sound-activated recording he’d been making since he got here. “Just hit stop, and then play,” he said.
“Wyland—”
“Shoot me if you want to, Sheriff. But Danica’s in the basement, and Karen Copeland is about to kill her. I’m going down there.”
Without waiting to see how things shook out, he snatched the gun Quinton had dropped, kicked the basement door open and ran down the stairs.
Chapter 22
Thankfully, the sheriff refrained from shooting him in the back.
Jude paused only briefly at the bottom of the stairs to put the night vision goggles on, and then ran into the green-tinted darkness. Someone was shouting, the words garbled and echoing through the cavernous stone spaces.
He’d just reached the edge of the light spilling from the cistern room and torn the goggles off when there was a sharp, rolling crack. A second gunshot sounded almost immediately.
A woman screamed.
“Sarah!”
He was barely aware that his partner’s name had left his lips as he barreled through the archway, drew a bead on the figure looming over the well and fired. The shot took Karen high in the shoulder, spinning her around to bounce off the back well and collapse with a pained cry.
“If she’s dead, you’re joining her.” He strode toward the stone well, the gun still pointed at the slumped woman. “Don’t you fucking move.”
Karen coughed weakly. “You wouldn’t kill a lady, would you?” she wheedled.
“Probably not. But I don’t see one here.”
At least that shut her up.
Jude stopped at the edge of the cistern. The opening was about five feet across, and the light reached maybe seven or eight feet down before it faded into a soupy blackness. “Danica,” he called. “Tell me you’re alive.”
After a long, agonizing moment, something shifted in the dark below. “I don’t know,” she rasped. “What are the chances we’re both dead?”
His throat convulsed in relief. “Pretty slim, actually,” he said. “All right. I’m getting you out of there.”
“What you’re going to do is drop that weapon.”
Jude sighed. “Sheriff,” he said, turning around slowly with his arms raised. He released the handle of the gun, let the trigger guard spin around his finger. “I’m dropping it,” he said. “And then I’m going to get Danica. She’s down there.”
Sheriff Singer fired.
“What the hell?” Jude shouted after he realized he wasn’t bleeding to death.
“I wasn’t talking to you, boy.” The sheriff gestured past him. “You’re welcome. Now you can put yours down.”
He did, and then turned around to meet Karen Copeland’s lifeless stare, a bullet hole trickling blood between her bulging eyes. The hand she’d been raising her gun with was still outstretched.
Singer crossed the room briskly, detaching a flashlight from his belt as he walked. “You say Miss Murray’s in that thing?” he said, stopping to switch the beam on and shine it down
the cistern. “Holy mother of God,” the sheriff said tonelessly as he leaned over the edge.
Jude looked down. Danica was pressed against one wall of the cistern, a hand over her eyes against the light. She was filthy and bleeding, but alive.
The desiccated corpse of a dark-haired woman curled along the opposite wall was not.
“Rafters,” Danica croaked, blinking rapidly as she lowered her hand and tilted her face up. “Aunt Sherry kept a ladder up there, in case any of the kids fell in. It never happened, though.” Her voice choked on the last few words.
Jude looked up, scanned the rafters above and spotted the ladder. “I see it,” he said. “And I’m coming.”
Singer stared at him as he wrestled the wooden rungs down. “Son, you don’t look in any shape to climb ladders,” he said. “Let me get one of my deputies down here—”
“I’m fine, Sheriff. She’s been down there long enough.”
He glanced at the well again, and then nodded once. “Could be you’re right.”
“I’m right, huh? I’ll remember you said that.”
Jude unfolded the ladder, fed it down and started climbing.
There was an ambulance waiting outside. Jude carried Danica through the house, out the front door, and laid her carefully on the stretcher the paramedics rushed up to meet them with. “Her left leg is broken, and she might’ve been shot,” he said.
“Yes, sir, we’ll take her from here,” one of the medics said.
“Wait.” Danica reached out and grabbed Jude’s hand. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I was sure they’d kill me down there.”
“Well, you’re still alive. Still breathing.” He smiled and squeezed gently. “Make sure you keep it that way. I’ll come see you once they’ve patched you up.”
“I’d like that.”
He nodded, and she let go as the paramedics started wheeling her away.
“I should call another ambulance for you,” the sheriff said from just behind him.
Jude didn’t look back. “Like I said, I’m fine.”
