Barking up the Wrong Tree: Willow Bay Witches #2

by Silver, Samantha

  I nodded. “Ok. I want to go check it out for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  “Ok, but be careful. Andrea says it’s a bad house.”

  Trepidation filled me as I got closer and closer to the ‘bad house’. Suddenly, I began to wonder if maybe this was a bad idea. What if the house was haunted after all? Or cursed? No, if it was either of those things Lisa would have mentioned it. Right?

  I took a deep breath as I reached the picket fence at the front that had once been white, but had now long since fallen into disrepair. Covered in mould and lichen, it could now kindly be described as a mixture of beige and puke green.

  Touching as little of the latch as possible, while thinking that maybe I should go to the doctor and make sure I got a tetanus shot, I pushed the door in the fence forward. It squeaked so loudly I knew it must have been years and years since anyone had oiled it. Sprinkles resisted coming in for a split second, but a light tug on the leash and he followed.

  It felt like the light level had just dropped about four levels. It no longer felt like evening; now it was well and truly night time.

  “What is wrong with you? You’re afraid of the dark or something?” I asked, muttering to myself. For goodness sake, I was twenty seven years old. My days of being afraid of the dark were supposed to be over.

  My resolve steeling after my self-talk, I walked forward towards the house. As I reached the front steps, I realized I had no idea what I was going to do. All the windows were boarded up, and had been for years. Surely the front door was going to be locked. I supposed I could use the spell to unlock it; there were no occupied houses in view, and the street looked deserted.

  It was upon that realization, that if anything happened I was well and truly on my own, that my heart really began to pound. As I got closer to the front door, I could tell Sprinkles next to me was scared as well. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

  I was about to turn back and head home, wrap myself under a blanket and try to sleep without having nightmares when the front door began to open.

  My mouth dropped open as the old oak door squeaked open, and I found myself standing face to face with Gareth Sims, owner of Boss the German Shepherd. He was holding a gun, and had it pointed towards me. I dropped Sprinkles’ leash in surprise, and as soon as the dog saw Gareth he let out a whimper like someone had hit him, and ran off as fast as he could.

  “Gareth?” I asked, barely believing what I was seeing. Why was he in this house? Why did he have a gun?

  “Angela. Please, come in,” he said. My mind whirled with a thousand thoughts. Was Sprinkles going to be ok? Poor thing had run off again. How could I contact Sophie? Did anyone know I was here? No. They just knew I’d gone for a walk towards Pine Street. Oh God, this man had a gun trailed on me and there was no one coming to save me.

  My heart plummeted to the bottom of my stomach. I was definitely in trouble here. But still, I had no choice. After all, Gareth had a gun. I followed him into the house, which was dark. There were no lights on at the front. He nudged me towards the living room at the back of the house, however, and there the lights were on.

  What I saw stopped me in my tracks. There was no furniture in the room at all, except for a cheap plastic chair in one corner. But in the middle of the room was what I immediately recognized from years of watching bad action movies as bricks of cocaine. Boss was sitting in the corner, and he growled at me, but one look from Gareth and he stopped and sat down.

  Oh boy. This was not good. Suddenly, everything started to make sense. Sprinkles calling it a ‘bad house’. Andrea living right across the street.

  “She found out about your drug den, didn’t she?” I ventured to ask, trying not to look at the gun Gareth was holding. He nodded, and put it in the back of his pants. Evidently he didn’t think I was much of a threat in here, especially not with Boss around. And as much as I hated to admit it, he was right. Gareth was a strong, young guy. He could easily overpower me, not to mention the dog.

  “Nosy old lady. We were so careful, too. For six months we’ve been here, and no one has been the wiser. There wasn’t a single person in town who’d even guessed that we were running drugs through here.”

  I thought about Jason Black and what he said about his source in the police department.

  “That’s not true,” I replied. “The cops know. They don’t know where you are, but they know you’re here.”

  Gareth scoffed. “Well what good is knowing we’re around if they can’t find us? That’s the beauty of Willow Bay. Everyone said I was a moron for doing this, but it’s perfect. No one suspects a dumb little tourist village, so far from the interstates, to house a drug running operation. After all, it’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone, right? Someone would notice, right?”

  I nodded. “How come no one has noticed, except for Andrea? I mean, this house is rural, but its’ not that rural. There are two other houses on the street that aren’t Andrea’s, and a few others on the nearby streets. If you’re on Birch, the quickest way downtown is to pass through Pine. Why hasn’t the extra traffic been noticed?”

  Gareth smiled at me, a cold smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Obviously that would be too conspicuous. No, we’ve done much better than that. You might see a small hole behind Boss, that leads into the crawl space under the house. We’ve built a tunnel there that leads into the forest. All we have to do is park our trucks on the side of the road, move the goods to the other end of the tunnel and load them up. No one drives on the roads around here at 3am, it’s such a deserted part of the world. Plus our trucks can pull off far enough that they’re almost impossible to see from the road. That way no one knows we’re here.”

  “How long did it take? Building the tunnel, I mean.” A part of me was genuinely curious, but to be honest, I really just wanted to keep Gareth talking. I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like anyone knew I was here to rescue me. It would take at least another hour before Charlotte began to get worried, and then even if she did, what reason could she possibly have to think I was in the creepy house?

  “About a month. GPS makes it a lot easier than it used to be.”

  “But if you were so careful, how did Andrea find out about you? And I found out too, just now. Surely you can’t expect to continue this forever.”

  “Andrea was too nosy for her own good. She would always be looking out her curtains at the street, glaring at this house, like she knew we were in it. Then one day she was walking past when Boss got scared and let out a bark. She came to the front of the house, and started looking inside the shutters. She went home, but I knew she wasn’t going to give up. I was going to take her out right then and there, but then that stupid niece of hers showed up. At least when the girl left I was able to follow Andrea by pretending to walk Boss. That was all the time I needed.”

  So it hadn’t been Kelly after all. Sophie was going to be so disappointed. If she ever heard about this, that was.

  “It’s just too bad you had to get involved too,” Gareth said.

  “There are people who know I’m here,” I tried. “They’re waiting for me to come back home. When I don’t, they’re going to come looking for me.”

  Gareth gave me that cold smile again. “Nice try, but I saw you coming. I know you weren’t planning on coming to this house, and why would you be in the creepy old house that no one ever goes to? No, they’ll narrow it down to this neighbourhood, but no one will ever find your body. Especially since it’s not going to leave by the front door.”

  A shiver ran up my spine as Gareth spoke so casually about my death, like it was just another day in the life of the drug dealer. I had to keep him talking. My only chance was to distract him and try and run away. If I could make it out the front door, maybe I had a chance of screaming loudly enough to get the neighbours to notice. Although Boss would definitely be able to catch me in that time.

  “Was Boss really poisoned in the park?” I asked. “Or was it here?”

  “One of my idiot runners le
ft his stash out and Boss got into it,” Gareth told me. “Now, come on. Get up. It’s time to go.”

  “What are we doing?” I asked, my heartrate instantly flying up to a record high.

  “You’re going to walk through the tunnel, and we’re going to meet a truck there. I’ve already texted a friend to meet us. It’ll be easier to kill you out there rather than have to drag your body through the tunnel.”

  I felt like I was going to puke.

  Chapter 19

  Now I was well and truly out of options. It was one thing to be in the house near where I was supposed to be, it was entirely another to be taken through a tunnel to a highway half a mile away on the other side of a forest.

  Gareth took the gun back out and motioned with it for me to get up. I did, slowly. I walked over towards the hole in the floor, where the floorboards had been removed. There was a small metal ladder leading down past the crawl space and into the underground tunnel. I began to walk down. After all, I didn’t have any other choice.

  Gareth followed after me, and I couldn’t help but notice that he left Boss at the house. It was just me and him now. And the gun, of course.

  When Gareth had originally mentioned a tunnel, I had imagined a small hole that a person could kind of crawl through on their hands and knees, an iphone flashlight lighting the way as the drug runners dragged along bags of cocaine to the waiting mule and his truck.

  I was dead wrong.

  The tunnel was easily five and a half feet tall, I only just barely had to stoop to fit under it. A diesel-powered generator hummed at the bottom, linked to a series of cheap lightbulbs that ran along the length of the ground, as well as up to the light in the house. This was actually a lot bigger, and a lot more sophisticated than I had expected. Even the walls were relatively evenly dug out. I looked around, trying to find something, anything, that might help me escape.

  After all, this was my last chance. The further I went into the tunnel with Gareth, the worse my chances of coming out alive.

  “Walk,” he ordered, and I slowly started to make my way through the tunnel. There was nothing else, just the dirt and the lights. I walked away from the lights and made my way towards the wall. The dirt was crumbly and loose. At least that was something. Maybe I could grab a handful and throw it in his face. But I knew that would only stop him for a second, and he had a gun. Although at this point, trying something and risking getting shot was almost certainly a better option than not doing anything and definitely getting shot.

  Suddenly, a memory from my childhood came flooding back to me. It was Christmas, and Charlotte was trying to set up a string of cheap Christmas lights to put on the tree. Charlotte being Charlotte, she sat on the floor meticulously untangling the Gordian knot of strings that somehow developed from a year in storage. I was on the couch reading a book, when suddenly Sophie came rushing in, excited about something, I couldn’t remember what anymore. She paid so little attention to what she was doing that she ran over one of the lights, and as soon as she smashed the bulb, the whole string went out. Charlotte cried for about two hours, it seemed like.

  I looked at the cord connecting the bulbs together. It looked cheap, flimsy. It looked like the type that might go out completely if I smashed a bulb.

  We were about fifty yards away from the house now. I was all too aware that I had a very limited amount of time to make my move before it was going to be too late.

  I counted down from ten to prepare myself.

  Ten, nine, eight.

  Oh God, this was dangerous.

  Seven, six, five.

  What if it doesn’t work? No, I couldn’t think about that.

  Four, three, two, one.

  Now.

  In one fluid move I stomped on one of the lightbulbs, at the same time as I grabbed a handful of dirt from the wall and threw it into Gareth’s face. I heard him cry out, but I’d shoved my way past him and was headed back towards the entrance.

  A shot rang out suddenly, and adrenaline pumped through my body even faster than before. A couple seconds later, when there was still no pain, I figured the bullet must have missed.

  I was running back as fast as I could in the dark, one hand against the side of the wall to guide me, the other in front of me so I didn’t run headlong into the ladder when I got to it. I was too scared to listen to see if Gareth was coming behind me, but I assumed he was.

  When my hand finally hit the cold metal of the ladder, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Now all I had to deal with was a one hundred pound German Shepherd. Easy, right?

  Scampering up the ladder as fast as I could, I grabbed it and tried to hoist it up after me, but as I was pulling it up I felt something else tugging it back down. Damn, it must have been Gareth. I knew that was a fight I couldn’t win, and besides, with Boss somewhere, I didn’t want to hang around. I dropped the ladder and began to run, hearing a low growl coming from somewhere behind me.

  I ran towards the front door, hoping against all hope that I wasn’t going to run headlong into a wall I couldn’t see and knock myself out. It had only been about thirty feet away when I had come in. I could make thirty feet before Boss found me.

  Of course, what would happen when I got outside was a whole different story, but there was no time to think about that now.

  When I reached forward and felt the door handle, I was so happy I could almost cry. I burst out the front door, slammed the door behind me, to the sound of ferocious barking from an angry dog behind it. I ran to the gate and darted out into the street before I noticed the sight in front of me.

  Running up the street towards me, their guns drawn, were Chief Gary and Taylor, Sophie’s boyfriend. Sophie was coming up behind him with Sprinkles, looking anxious.

  “He’s in there, he has a gun,” I managed to gasp before I collapsed to the ground, wishing for the second time in just a few months that I found the time to go running, occasionally. Having the cardio skills of an elephant felt like hell when you had to run for your life.

  The two cops made their way towards the door at the same time as I heard sirens in the distance.

  “He called for backup, that’ll be them,” Sophie said, looking anxiously over at her boyfriend who was heading towards the house with Chief Gary.

  “Come out with your hands up!” Chief Gary ordered as they approached the fence. Suddenly, the door opened and Boss came flying out, barking like crazy. He was stopped by the fence.

  “He’s going to go through the tunnel to escape!” I said. Sophie looked at me with a mixture of confusion and fear.

  “Chief Gary!” I shouted. “He has a tunnel! It goes to the highway, that’s where he’s going.”

  I heard Chief Gary immediately get on his radio.

  He and Taylor moved back towards Sophie, Sprinkles and I as I was bent over, hands on my knees, still panting like I’d finished a marathon.

  “Support’s coming, Angela. Don’t worry,” Chief Gary told me. “You’re safe now.”

  As soon as Chief Gary said those words it was like it triggered a delayed reaction in my body, which was catching up on everything I’d just gone through. Suddenly, I began to sob. I sat down on the ground, letting the tears fall, as Sprinkles came up to me and rested his head on my knee.

  “I’m glad you’re safe,” he told me. I couldn’t reply, I just gave him a bit of a scratch behind the ears as tears fell down my face.

  Sophie sat down next to me and wrapped an arm around me. “Let it out, Angela,” she told me. “Let it all out.”

  I had come so close to dying. Like, really, really close. Gareth Sims had shot a gun at me with the intention of killing me. If it wasn’t for remembering that thing about the cheap lights all going out, I might be lying dead on the back of a truck right now.

  I knew I had just gone through something similar a few months ago. Zoe Wright had almost killed me as well. But it’s just not something you ever get used to. At least, I wasn’t used to it.

  And this time, Gareth had shot at
me. He actually pulled the trigger and tried to fire a bullet to kill me. Even the thought of it made bile rise in my throat.

  I don’t know how long I sat there crying for, but eventually Charlotte arrived and sat down next to me as well, and a while later a bunch of cops arrived, and an ambulance. Sophie waved them over, and a group of three EMTs came by, carrying a stretcher.

  “Ma’am, we’re going to take you to the hospital now,” one of them, a woman not much older than me said, placing a hand on my shoulder. Her touch was soft, almost loving.

  “I don’t need a stretcher,” I managed to get out.

  “It’s the rules, ma’am,” the lady said. “We’re going to give you something to sleep for a while,” she told me. Realizing they wanted to sedate me, I just didn’t have the energy to fight it. Besides, it would probably be good for me. Mutely, I nodded, and they loaded me up onto the stretcher and into the ambulance, where an IV was instantly expertly inserted into my arm.

  The last thing I remember was Sophie arguing with the EMTs to let Sprinkles ride along as well.

  “He saved her life. He should get to come!”

  “Sprinkles,” I managed to mutter, looking over at the dog’s happy face, just as everything went black.

  Chapter 20

  For the second time in two months I woke up in a hospital bed in Portland. But this time, Charlotte was by herself, reading a book that probably weighed as much as I did. I stared at the title for a while. ‘Biomedicine, embryology and the gynaecology of the future’. Wow. That sure was a mouthful.

  Suddenly, Charlotte noticed I was awake.

  “Angela!” she said, dropping the book onto the chair next to her and getting up and giving me a hug. “I’m so glad you’re safe!”

  “Me too, not gonna lie,” I replied, managing to crack a small smile. Charlotte beamed at me.

  “I’m so glad you’re ok I’m not even going to berate you for going into that house all by yourself.”