by Brian Harper
“Cain won’t like it,” Ally whispered, her throat dry.
Lilith shrugged. “He won’t know.”
“He knew when Trish lied-on the radio.”
Hesitation.
Ally pressed her small advantage. “Doesn’t he know you better than Trish Won’t he be … disappointed in you”
Nothing further she could say. Her life was Lilith’s toy.
The laser winked out.
“You’re a smart girl, Alison.” The childish voice was flat, empty of affection. “I’ll bet you get good grades.”
Ally lifted her chin, feeling an absurd access of pride. “Straight A’s.”
“Well,”-Lilith smiled-“you’ll be starting a whole new education soon.”
Trish was drowning, drowning for real this time, drowning as the gloved hands held her under with savage tenacity, and her last hope was the knife, the knife, she had to get the knife.
She flailed behind her, pawing empty space, unable to close her fists over anything solid.
Her lungs were emptying fast. Little time left.
He’d tried to drown her in the lake, the bastard, and now he was going to finish the job in six inches of water, and she couldn’t break free.
There.
She touched the handle. Wrapped her fingers around it. Jerked it out of its sheath. Twisting it sideways, she drove the blade blindly to her right.
Momentary resistance, then a sickening surrender as the point punched through clothes and skin.
Tyler howled. Weakened by pain, he released her.
She left the knife inside him. Whipped her head out of the sink. Pivoted, gasping, in a spray of droplets. Lunged for the holster at his hip.
He had the same thought, but not in time. When he scrabbled at the holster, it was already empty, the Glock in her shaking grasp.
Her wounded leg threatened to buckle. Awkwardly she reached out with her left hand, grasping the counter for support, then backed toward the doorway. Through a net of dripping hair she watched him, ready to shoot but not wanting to.
Tyler sagged. A red glaze coated his jump suit below the haft of the embedded knife. Sweat popped out of the pores on his forehead and cheeks. His eyes were feverish and bright.
“You stuck me,” he grunted, and she could almost taste the dryness of his mouth, the same dryness she had known after being shot. “Hurt me bad.”
Grimacing, he tugged at the knife buried in his side until the blade slid free like a red tongue.
When he looked up again, his mouth formed a smile. “Now it’s your turn to be hurting.”
The threat seemed pitiful, a crippled dog’s feeble bark.
“I don’t think so,” she breathed, and took another backward step.
Cold.
Metal lips kissed the nape of her neck.
Behind her, a whisper: “But I do.”
Cain’s voice.
And Cain’s gun, the muzzle chilly on her skin.
He had entered through the doorway while her back was turned.
“Drop the gun,” Cain ordered.
Her hand opened. She watched the Glock fall, feeling nothing, her emotions on hold.
“I tried to make her say where the girl is.” Tyler gasped out the words like a last testament. “She told me a story. I don’t know if it’s true.”
Cain was unconcerned. “Lilith will handle the girl.”
Trish shut her eyes.
Lilith. The one with the cold, flat eyes that gleamed with malice.
Ally would have no chance against her.
It was over, then. Over for both of them.
A cough from Tyler. “So do it. Waste her.”
Trish waited, thinking emptily that she had started the night with Cain’s gun to her head, and now here she was, two hours and a lifetime later, in this mean little shop amid the racks of Lay’s potato chips and the napkin dispensers and the stale smell of grease, and nothing had changed.
“Turn around, Trish.” Cain said it almost gently, as if addressing a child.
She hesitated.
“Come on now. Don’t be shy.” He was breathing slowly, deeply, like a man in a trance. “I just want one last look at those big blue eyes.”
Tyler tried a chuckle but managed only another dry cough.
She turned slowly, transferring her grip on the counter from her left hand to her right, ashamed somehow of her lameness. She hated having them see her like this, beaten in so many ways.
A broad chest swung into view. A shiny Glock, unsilenced, in a gloved hand. Past the gun, the grainy smear of a face.
She raised her head, meeting Cain’s eyes, those smoke-gray eyes that had studied her through holes in a ski mask last time.
No mask now. She saw his face.
God-his face.
In stunned recognition she whispered one word.
“You.”
68
“I’ve got it.”
Barbara turned toward the rear corner of the closet, where Philip Danforth knelt amid the fallen wardrobes and the dislodged shelves, shining the flashlight at the wall.
“Got what” she asked.
His answer made her heart speed up: “A way out.”
She was crouching at his side an instant later.
“I’ve been checking the walls for damage.” Excitement trembled in his voice. “The explosion shook this place pretty hard. Look here.”
Her gaze followed the pointing flash. One of the heavy oak panels, four feet wide and eight feet high, had been wrenched partly free of the studs.
“We can pull the panel away,” Barbara whispered, “and crawl through.”
“Can we really” That was Judy. “Thank God. Thank God.”
From his perch on the wicker hamper, where he seemed permanently enthroned, Charles spoke up. “In case you’ve forgotten, there’s another wall on the opposite side.”
Philip glanced at Barbara. “Is it oak”
She had to think for a moment, imagining the layout of the bedroom suite. “No. It’s the linen closet in the master bath. Drywall, not oak. Half-inch drywall.”
A shrug from Philip. “We can punch right through that.”
“They’ll hear us,” Charles said.
“I’m not talking about busting down the damn doors.” Philip was losing his patience. “This won’t make nearly as much noise.”
“They might hear us anyway. Even if they don’t, suppose they happen to come back while you’re crawling through-“
“Then they’ll shoot me.” Philip’s face was sweaty in the flashlight’s glow, the cut on his lip an ugly vertical line. “I’ll risk it.”
“They may shoot all of us. Will you risk that”
“I will,” Barbara snapped, fed up with her husband’s weakness, his unaccountable passivity.
Judy touched the bare spot at her throat where her fingers sought a crucifix. “Me too.”
“Now wait a minute-“
“You’re outvoted, Charles.” Philip spoke briskly, a man in a hurry. “Three to one.” He turned to Barbara. “We need a tool to pry the panel loose. Crowbar, claw hammer, something like that.”
“Damn it.” Charles made one last effort. “You’re all getting hysterical. You need to calm down and think-“
Judy whirled on him. “Oh, shut your fucking mouth.”
There was a moment of politely shocked silence, and even Judy seemed to blush. But no one apologized.
Barbara broke the stillness. To Philip: “How about this”
She handed him a heavy wooden hanger salvaged from the heap of clothes. Philip wedged one corner of the triangular frame into the crack between the panel and the stud.
“Could work,” he grunted, applying pressure.
As Barbara watched, the panel shuddered outward a fraction of an inch, the long screws groaning.
“It’s coming,” she whispered, exultation singing in the words.
Judy managed a tremulous half-smile.
And Charles … he simply watched, rigid on
the hamper, his facial muscles oddly slack, his eyes empty-as if he were witnessing the death of hope.
69
“Come on, boss,” Tyler growled, “do her.”
Cain didn’t bother to answer. His gaze remained fixed on Trish Robinson.
“You know me,” he said softly.
It was not a question. He had heard her astonished whisper, had seen the recognition in her eyes.
Slowly she nodded. “I know you.”
“How”
“Marta Palmer.”
The name was meaningless to him. He waited.
“She was nine years old. You picked her up as she was walking home from school.” Her voice was low and steady, the voice of a judge pronouncing sentence. “You made her take you to a secluded place, an abandoned farmhouse she knew about. And when you got there, you raped her, and you killed her, and you left her in the field with a jump rope tied around her neck.”
The jump rope was what did it. He remembered that detail. The rest was largely lost in a haze of distance, but the jump rope stood out in his mind with photographic clarity. He could see the braided red-and-white cord, the rubber handles. Could see his wrists twisting as he jerked the line taut. Could see the girl’s eyes swelling, her lips skinned back in a leering rictus.
Marta Palmer. Yes. He remembered.
But …
“How could you know”
He seized Trish by the shoulders, whirled her away from the counter, slammed her against the opposite wall.
“That was fifteen years ago.” He leaned close, his mouth inches from hers. “How the hell could you know”
She did not blink, did not stammer.
“Because,” she said simply, “I was there.”
A beat of silence.
Cain flicked his gaze away from her, directing it down a deep well of memory, then refocused on her face.
“There were two of them,” he breathed. “Two little girls.”
“Yes.”
“Walking home together.”
“Yes.”
“You were the other one.”
“Yes.”
He saw it in his mind: a blurred kinescope of that September day. Two schoolgirls on a tree-shaded road. Wavering spots of sunlight dappled their hair, blonde hair, shiny and soft.He’d had other girls, girls no older than these-but never two at once. The challenge prompted him to stop his red convertible alongside the pair, under a maple tree’s spreading bouquet of golden leaves.
One girl was tall for her age and flirtatious, eager to show off an imagined sophistication. She was an easy mark.
Her friend was different. Quiet. Wary. Cain remembered a thin, thoughtful face and perceptive eyes.
Blue eyes. Trish Robinson’s eyes.
“You tried to coax us both into the car,” Trish whispered, providing commentary for the filmstrip unspooling in his thoughts. “Too hot to walk, you said. Hop in. You’d take us up the road.”
His usual M.O. at the time. He’d been unscarred then. Presentable. Tanned and windburned after days on the open road.
“You put a cassette into the tape player. Said we could listen to some tunes.”
The taller girl had accepted his offer, mischievously aware that she was breaking her parents’ rules, smug in her rebellion.
“Marta went along,” Trish breathed. “I didn’t.”
Cain nodded slowly. “You told her not to go.”
“Yes. I told her.” She shut her eyes against the memory. “But she went anyway. And … and I …”
“You ran. And bought yourself fifteen years.” He smiled. “I hope you made the most of them.”
“For Christ’s sake, boss.” Tyler sagged against the counter. “What the hell are you waiting for Make her dead.”
“Haven’t you been listening” Cain asked evenly. “Officer Robinson is a voice from my past.”
“She’s a damn bug you can’t squish, that’s what she is. Now’s the time”-he coughed, grimacing, his hand pressed to the stab wound-“to stomp her once and for all.”
Cain nodded. Objectively he knew Tyler was right. He had Robinson where he wanted her. Just pull the trigger, and she would be dead, no threat ever again.
But …
As a child she had been meant for him.
And when he looked into her face, he saw her not as a woman of twenty-four, exhausted and injured, wearing the ragged remnants of a police uniform, but as a nine-year-old girl in shorts and a T-shirt, toting a bookbag, her hair brilliant in an aureole of sun.
The clarity of the image, its visceral, almost tactile reality, was what decided the issue in his mind.
Cain holstered his Glock, then spun Trish around, mashing her face against the wall, and yanked her arms behind her back.
She still wore the handcuffs, but the chain had snapped.
“Shot ‘em off, huh” He chuckled. “Too bad. Those bracelets looked real good on you. Luckily I got a brand-new pair.”
He dug in his pocket. Produced the cuffs taken from Wald’s belt. Snapped them over her wrists.
“Boss,” Tyler mumbled, “we really don’t have time for this.”
Cain was unfazed. “Of course we don’t. Not now. But later …”
He turned Trish to face him. Cupping her chin, he tilted her head at an angle.
“Later you’ll cry like Marta did. You’ll call for your mommy too. And after you’ve cried and screamed for a good long while, I’ll put a rope around your neck and I’ll finish you just the way I would’ve done it on that farmhouse porch.”
He wanted her to flinch from the words, but she merely stared at him, those blue eyes seeing too much.
“Move,” he snapped, and pushed her roughly toward the door.
She staggered, her left knee buckling. He caught her from behind. For the first time he noted the bandage on her leg.
“What’s this, Trish Bullet” His tongue clucked in mock sympathy. “Somebody poke a hole in you”
She nodded in answer, pain squeezing her mouth in a bloodless line.
“Well, my friend’s hurt just as bad.” He tossed a glance at Tyler, stooping awkwardly to retrieve his Glock. “Maybe worse. And he’s still ambulatory. Now march.”
She took another step, nearly fell again. Cain held her up by the collar.
Through gritted teeth she gasped, “I can’t.”
“Then I’ve got to carry you. But if I do, I’ll make sure you’re not faking it.” He slid his gun barrel slowly under her nose, letting her smell the lubricant. “You know what it means to be kneecapped, Trish”
A slow swallow rippled down her throat. She looked down at the Glock, then at his face, and he read the anguish and the fury in her eyes.
“March,” he said again, and let go.
With what must have been a concentrated effort of will, she stayed erect.
Her leg was shaking as she advanced another step, but this time she did not totter, did not fall. Head lowered, sweat shining on her face, she hobbled across the threshold, not looking back.
She had guts. Cain conceded that much as he followed her out the door. The little rookie would have made one hell of a cop. If she had lived.
70
“Eight-one. Go.”
“Hey, eight-one, it sure took long enough to raise you.”
“Sorry for the delay. We were code seven. Grabbing some chow.”
Ed Edinger paced the small equipment room adjacent to the dispatchers’ office. Radio transmissions were recorded here, on antique reel-to-reel machines.
Normally the long-playing reels were changed only at the end of each shift, but tonight one reel had been replaced ahead of schedule.
The original reel now played on another machine.
“Yeah, well, I kind of let that code seven slide.” Lou’s voice rasped over cheap speakers, sounding even more scratchy than usual. “It’s been an hour. Look, what’s your location”
“Hospers Road, west of the highway.”
That was Robinson
, of course. Funny thing, though. There was an unusual quality to her speech pattern, a formality that seemed somehow artificial.
“Okay,” Lou was saying, “we got a ten-thirty-three at the Cracker Barrel on Johnson. You back in service or what”
“Ten-four, we’ll take it.”
“Twenty-one twenty-five.”
Ed glanced at his watch. The time was 10:16. Forty-one minutes had passed since the unit had been dispatched.
The tape continued playing, other units on the air. He didn’t listen. He was thinking.
The whole exchange troubled him. It was highly uncharacteristic of Pete Wald to go code seven at all, let alone so early in his shift. And to stay out of service for an hour, then be tardy in responding when called …
Grabbing some chow, Robinson had said. On Hospers Road.
Nothing over that way except some fast-food hamburger joints. Pete avoided those places on his doctor’s orders. Cholesterol.
And Robinson’s voice … Ed couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong, indefinably wrong, about her voice.
He stopped pacing. “Find the previous transmission,” he told the clerk operating the tape machine. “About an hour earlier.”
The clerk checked Lou’s log, then rewound the tape while Ed waited, massaging his forehead with a weary hand.
What a night.
First some sort of sonic boom or explosion or minor earthquake had rocked the foothills, precipitating a deluge of frantic calls and tripping every motion-sensitive burglar alarm in town.
He had telephoned Cal Tech in Pasadena, but the seismology lab had been unable to explain the event or pinpoint its source. A mystery, and a major hassle.
And now 4-Adam-8l was missing. Wald and Robinson had never responded to the 10-33 on Johnson Way. Efforts to raise them had proved futile so far.
When the tape counter was in approximately the right place, the clerk backed and filled, nitrous-oxide voices squealing over the speakers, until he located the start of the exchange.
“We’re clear of the detail,” Robinson was saying. “No sign of a prowler.”
Lou: “Guess Pete was right. You didn’t need backup.”
“Ten-four.”
“Hey, is that the Kent place”
“Ten-four.”
“Thought I recognized the address. I saw it on a house tour once. Nice digs.”
