Blake begged, “But this is my last chance to do it right. Sweet, sweet Candy, help me do it right.”
I actually felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to change my plans. Keeping my Candy eyes wide and misty and innocent of any cynical thoughts, I said, “It’s all right to keep our clothes on, because we have to hurry. The gestapo’s coming, Blake. Hear them?”
He heard. Thumping sounds, and a metallic pounding.
I said, “Give me the knife. Give me Pandora. Quick.”
“No, that’s not right. The man has to do it first.” He was crying again, my brutalized, vulnerable, wretched so-called prince. “It’s like dancing. The man leads. Candy, give me your left wrist.”
Thinking, For Juliet, I lifted my arm, palm up, and presented my wrist to be slashed.
* * *
When Sam White ripped the metal doors off the cellar entryway, both Sissy and Gerardo stood with their mouths open—Airing my molars, Sissy thought as she tried to get her jaw under control—staring as Sam plunged into shadows.
Wham, came the sound of his shoulder against— Jogging closer, Sissy could see green doors, metal ones, judging by the sound the impact had made.
And made again.
Wham.
Sissy saw Bert limping down what appeared to be steep steps, going after Sam.
Wham.
“No handle!” shouted somebody—a man’s voice, and she never knew who. But Gerardo was the one who caught her by the arm to stop her, saying, “Better stay back. We don’t know what the hell is going on.”
Sissy for once did not bristle, did not mind that an authoritative male was protecting her, because she was in a sense his guest, and having been hustled out of bed in a hurry, she wore no uniform, no bulletproof vest, and carried no weapon. She stopped, but she had gotten close enough to stare down at the steep concrete block steps leading to the green door. She barely noticed Bert or Sam. Her perception caught on the massive metal barrier and the building behind it.
“He’s in there,” Sissy whispered.
Gerardo stared at Sissy the way she was staring into the shadows. “What did you say?”
“Blake Roman! He’s in there.”
“What makes you think that?”
“The door. Plus my gut. The way I read him. He’s a creep, a twisted specimen of slime mold, but he thinks he’s an outlaw. This place is an outlaw hideout he’s made for himself—it’s his hole-in-the-wall, his fortress. He’s in there with his big bad knife, waiting.”
“Why wait? If he’s in there and he’s a killer, how come he isn’t shooting at us?”
“He so prefers his knife.” Sissy was doing the shooting, firing thoughts straight out her mouth, trusting her instincts to hit a target she could not yet see. “And just an ordinary knife wouldn’t be good enough for this guy, you know? He’s conflicted. A knife’s up close and personal, all face-to-face, bloody, and for some reason that appeals to him. But, being a psycho, he’s also distant. Cold. Remote. Egotistic. A legend in his own mind, but at the same time he can’t quite shake the feeling he’s really a creepy pervert, so he’d like more respect, he’d like to be king, you know? Off with their heads. A sword is just an oversized knife.”
“The light just came on!” some woman screamed.
Voices babbled. Agent Gerardo swiveled away from Sissy to see what was going on. “In that room with the broken window!” the woman screamed. “I’m telling you, an electric light just came on in there!”
Sissy’s eyes widened, the light came on in her mind, and she grabbed Gerardo by the sleeve, shouting at him, “Remote control! That’s why the door won’t open, has no handle on the outside. That’s why the light just came on for no reason. Your unsub has his hideout rigged so that everything is operated by remote control!”
* * *
Standing in that dark, dead-end passageway to nowhere, I felt more than saw the blood flowing from my slit wrist, aware of it as a fluid I gave for Juliet, much as I would have given milk if I had ever breast-fed my baby girl.
The unspeakable man who had once been the love of my teenage life gazed into my eyes. Salt water ran down his face; tears were the fluid he gave. “Good, Candy,” he said, his voice clotted with emotion. “Good.”
The words meant nothing, but a sweet taste filled my mouth simply because I was still alive, aware, on my feet and able.
Blake demanded of me huskily, “You know what to do, don’t you?”
I nodded. This was more deeply true than he could possibly imagine.
“Be my blood lover, Candy.” Intent on me, he gazed into my face. “Help me. Help me finally do it right.”
There is no telling what he saw in my eyes.
Or dreamed he saw.
And needed. No telling the depth of that need.
Hesitating, he reached toward me, the knife lying in his slack hand.
Pandora.
The mother of all knives.
The weapon with a woman’s name.
I reached out for her, took her in my hand, and her thick black handle fitted into my palm like a fat baby into a cradle. Hefting her, I felt more than heard something click as my hand tightened around her hilt. I saw a golden glow spring up like a candle flame at the far end of the dark passageway. No, more than candle flame, far brighter, greater. It was as if God or some angel had turned on the sun down here.
Let there be light. Electric light in the room where Juliet sat helpless.
Juliet. Kidnapped, abducted, captured, imprisoned. Duct tape binding her to a chair. Duct tape sealing her mouth.
Juliet, my daughter.
Our daughter.
Blake startled as the light flowed onto us from behind us, and for a moment I cringed. But Blake kept his focus; his face grew yet more rapt. “Good, Candy, good!” he breathed. “I need to show you something before we die.” He grabbed the knife back from me.
Oh, God, I hated my own clumsiness. I felt all my strength quite literally bleeding out of me. I’d lost my chance—
Swiftly Blake slit his left sleeve from wrist to shoulder, then opened it, throwing it over his back like a hero’s cloak. Then he turned slightly so that I could see—a tattoo.
Sickening.
Dedicated to me.
I had never liked tattoos, and I found this one even more hideous than most. Into the flesh of Blake’s upper arm were inked red lines in the shape of a bloated, oversized mouth, wide open like that of a hungry suckling. Within the mouth melted a red heart. And in dark blue script across the heart flowed the word “Candy.”
“Candy, do you see? Do you understand?” Speaking, he almost sobbed. “It’s always you. All my life, it’s always been for you, my Candy, my sweet, my love. Now do it. Join us. Join us in the final embrace.”
And he handed the knife back to me.
Once more, almost in disbelief, I hefted the deadly weapon in my hand.
Villain in silhouette, Blake might have been a youth again, masterful and romantic, as he reached toward me, presenting his naked left arm to me, his wrist awaiting me, his hand turned up toward heaven.
Was there a heaven?
Was there a hell?
In that moment I knew what it meant to have a soul and I knew what it meant to face judgment. A red river of Jordan flowed from my wrist and I felt faint. Reeling, I lifted the knife in my right hand, and yes, yes, I knew what I must do, but I didn’t know whether I was going to be strong enough.
* * *
Dark cellar entryway. Green metal door, no handle. Dorrie was in there, Sam knew without knowing how he knew. He didn’t understand much of what was going on. Barely comprehended the bony hand on his arm and the gritty voice in his ear:
“Mr. White, you’re trespassing. You can’t get in there and you don’t know what’s
in there if you did. You’re in danger of getting yourself killed.”
Oh. Bert.
“Go away,” Sam muttered, lurching toward the remorseless metal door to tackle it again.
Bert’s grip on his arm tightened with surprising force for such an old guy, restraining him. Bert’s voice turned stern. “Mr. White, you come on out of here before I have to put the cuffs on you.”
Sam shook his head, tried to shake away Bert’s steely hand. “I have to get in,” he said thickly, struggling against Bert’s grip, straining to launch himself against the door again.
“Mr. White—”
Inside, someone screamed so horribly that it cut off all the noise from Bert and the others, slicing through the moment like a knife. Sam felt his heart stop. The shriek ended too sharply, bursting into silence like a bubble of blood, and the very silence screamed. For a moment Sam stood as rigid as a pillar of salt. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t tell whether that awful noise had come from a child, a woman, or a man. But it had sounded human and it had sounded like someone was dying.
In the screaming silence, all the church bells of Appletree began to toll the call to Sunday morning early worship.
FIFTEEN
Gradually a red mist of panic and rage cleared from Sam’s eyesight. Blinking, he found himself standing in that selfsame infernal gravel parking lot while several different kinds of cops and fire department volunteers and emergency personnel swarmed all around him. At some point an ambulance had materialized, and a ladder truck, and swerving around the corner that moment came a white van with a bright TV logo painted on its side. Reporters. For all the good they’d do. Sam tried to look down the concrete steps at the green door, but he couldn’t see it; the cellar stairwell was a bobbing sea of heads in black fire helmets, yellow hard hats, blue police caps.
Standing there, Sam felt his heart pounding. Felt wetness on his face. Fear. Tears. He tried to lift a hand to clear his eyes.
Couldn’t. Something made of cold metal clamped his wrists behind his back.
Despite a bruised and aching feeling throughout his body, Sam only vaguely remembered having been forcibly removed from the stairwell. Evidently they had handcuffed him.
But . . . but handcuffs were for criminals. Their steely grip renewed Sam’s panic.
“Hey! Get these damn things off me!” he yelled. If ever in life there was an occasion for swearing, this had to be it. Struggling, wrenching against the handcuffs, Sam felt them skinning his wrists, but they wouldn’t let go. He wasn’t strong enough. “Somebody get these goddamn things off!” he bellowed, but none of the swearwords he knew were strong enough either.
No one paid any attention to him. No one even looked at him. Except for the ones who were running back and forth with camcorders and microphones, they were all running in circles and yelling at one another: Bring the Jaws of Life! No, everybody get back till the SWAT team gets here. Hell, what do they plan to use, dynamite? Bring a pry bar, get the plywood off one of the windows. Nobody go near any of the windows. Try one of the windows around the other side. Everybody’s supposed to get back. We’re going in. Not there, you idiot. Too small. Upstairs. Bring the ladder. Get the ladder away from the window. Bring the ladder, Goddamn it, sometime before we all get too much older. Orders, countermanded orders, revised orders, contradictory orders, total lack of order.
Instinctively, like a trapped animal, Sam tried to move, and found that even with cuffs binding his hands behind his back, he could still walk. Weaving through the chaos around the back of the old brick building, he saw a familiar craggy oldster in a blue uniform. “Bert,” he begged, “get these handcuffs off me.”
But Bert responded only with a stare that passed right through him without any apparent comprehension.
Sam looked around for another blue uniform. Who the heck were all those people on the sidewalk? Most of them wearing their Sunday best, they had been on their way to church, Sam surmised, but were enjoying live entertainment instead. Uniformed police officers were trying to keep them and the news reporters back, giving the parking lot space to more important police officials such as the men in suits. Vaguely Sam recognized the FBI agents from the Phillipses’ dining room; now they clustered in a football huddle at the corner of the building. Along with them stood a burly blue back. Sam approached it.
“Excuse me,” he said, his courtesy a plaintive throwback to the way life used to be a day ago, “could you please take these handcuffs off?”
The cop turned, scowling. It was Walker. “What the hell you doing here? I told them to put you on ice!”
“What are you holding him for?” demanded one of the FBI Men in Suits, a tough-looking guy with ice blue eyes.
“Interfering with a police officer in the performance of his—”
“Bullshit. Let him go.”
“You trying to tell me what to do? We been through this before and we’re going to keep going through it until you feds get a clue. Read my lips. I Hold Jurisdiction Here.”
“You are holding back from us, is what you are holding. Where’s Officer Roman?”
Sam heard this without interest or comprehension. “My wife’s in there,” he said, the words coming out of him compulsive, inane. “Her car was here. Her purse is here. I don’t know whether that was her screaming. I never heard anybody scream like that.”
“Bert!” Walker roared, turning his back on the FBI. “Get your rear in gear over here! Agent Gerardo wants to talk with you.”
“I don’t know whether she’s all right,” Sam said.
Walker had already stalked away. Bert appeared not to have heard his boss’s order; he stood staring at something that apparently only he could see. Sam gave a gaze of mute appeal to the FBI guys, but they headed toward Bert. His wandering glance caught on a familiar caramel-colored face.
She saw him at the same time. Officer Chappell from Fulcrum. Not in uniform. Out of place here. Didn’t seem to know what to do any more than he did. She ran over to him like a frightened kid. “Mr. White! Mr. White, that awful scream, who was it?”
“I don’t know.” Because he liked her and felt he could trust her, he added, “I pray it wasn’t Dorrie.”
“Did it sound like her?”
“I just don’t know. Would you take these handcuffs off me?”
“Handcuffs! What did they cuff you for?”
“For trying to get in, I guess.”
“But somebody’s got to get in!”
“I know. Could you take them off?”
“Mr. White, I don’t have the authority to remove your handcuffs. Of course I’ve probably already lost my job. But I don’t have the key either.”
Sam barely heard any of what she was saying except the gist. What mattered to him. She couldn’t help him.
Time to face it.
Nobody was going to take the handcuffs off.
Sam turned his back even though Sissy Chappell was still speaking to him. He no longer heard her. Like a locked-out puppy trying to get into the house the only way it knows, he headed back toward the rear of the building, toward the place where he’d been as close to Dorrie as he’d gotten yet.
The green door.
The cellar entryway stood empty now. The men in black helmets and yellow hard hats and blue caps had swarmed around to the side of the building where the light had come on.
Sam looked down the concrete steps. With its green paint somewhat scratched now, the metal door still stood there, relentless, inscrutable, impregnable.
Carefully, a bit off-balance with his hands cuffed behind him, Sam descended the steps. It was cold down there. Dank. Shadowed. A chill hell. He stood staring at the door.
Dorrie. Behind it somewhere. Sure as a compass pointing toward the north, he could feel her presence in there.
Maybe alive.
Maybe dead.
The thought made him gulp and bow his head. Tears burned his eyes. He’d never felt more helpless than he did at that moment, with the people who were supposed to help him playing power games, nobody giving a damn about Dorrie. . . . For lack of a friendly shoulder, Sam leaned against the strong, cold metal door.
CLICK. From inside its metal torso.
The door swung open.
SIXTEEN
Bert was still trying to connect with things flying in all directions—Blake’s name zinging at him like a bullet out of nowhere, a dark green door without a handle, a light springing on, somebody’s agonized scream—he was still trying to figure out what devilment was getting milled in the middle of all the chips shooting this way and that when he heard Walker yell his name.
“Bert!”
Actually he heard his name hanging in the air for a moment after it was yelled.
In kind of a delayed reaction, Bert took in the order after it was issued. Oh. Damn. They’d made the connection. The feds wanted to talk with him.
Focusing, then slowly turning his head, Bert saw two things: the FBI agents heading toward him, and Sam White striding across the parking lot, heading toward the steep concrete steps down to the basement and the inscrutable green doors. It took Bert no time at all to decide he preferred Sam’s company to that of the FBI. He sure didn’t want to answer a lot of nosy questions just because his last name happened to be Roman. However, it took him a moment to get himself moving. His stiff old arms and legs didn’t want to work right these days. As quickly as he could, he limped after Sam.
As Bert shambled along, he tried to reason a way out of this mess. The way Bert’s mind worked, he couldn’t just let the chips fall wherever; he had to try to line them up in some way that made sense. And the way to do that was to start with the facts of the case: The White woman was missing and the girl Juliet Phillips was missing. Sam White said the girl had been abducted by some guy in a van and Dorrie White had followed. Walker said Dorrie White had abducted the girl. He was still saying it and he wanted to go busting into the old library and get both of them. For some reason, though, the FBI had changed its thinking. Now the suits thought there was a dangerous felon, a serial rapist/killer, holding both the woman and the girl in that building. The FBI wanted to set up a command post, establish communications, bring in the sharpshooters and the listening devices and the expert negotiators, and in general hold off until the cavalry arrived.
Dark Lie (9781101607084) Page 21
