The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls)

by Linwood Barclay

  I gurgled something.

  “What?”

  “Twenty-three,” I said. “All of that was you.”

  “I was sending a message,” he said. “That justice was coming.

  I wanted people to be afraid. I was so pleased when I saw you were figuring it out. That’s why I phoned you that time.”

  “You’re an engineer,” I said. “You had the smarts for everything. The Ferris wheel, the bus, blowing up the drive-in. But Mason Helt . . .” For a moment there, things had gone dark. “Helt,” I said.

  “He took theater. I approached him, said he was going to be part of a study, something sanctioned by the college. About fear and paranoia. He was skeptical, but a thousand bucks went a long way to convincing him. After, I knew it was a mistake, actually meeting with a third party, bringing someone else into this. I caught a break when he ended up dead. I might have had to kill him myself if that hadn’t happened.”

  I mumbled something else.

  “What’s that?” Walden said.

  “Tate. Tate Whitehead.”

  Walden nodded. “I knew there’d only be one person at the water plant, and that it would be him. I couldn’t be interrupted. It took a long time to bring in what I needed.”

  “Sodium something.”

  “Azide,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “It took a long time to acquire what I needed. More than two years. I was stockpiling it, knowing I’d use it someday. I just didn’t know when. I knew I’d never do it while Beth was alive. I couldn’t run the risk of being sent away while she was still with me. But when she passed away, I knew it was time to move forward.”

  “Walden . . . please don’t kill me. . . . Turn yourself in. Your first instinct was the right one. Tell everyone why you did what you did. Make them understand how they failed you, how they failed Olivia.”

  He looked at me solemnly. “I’m sorry. But no.”

  “Walden, listen to me. You—”

  There was the sound of a loud knocking.

  Walden’s head whipped around. “Jesus.” Panic washed over his face.

  “Walden?” someone shouted. “You home?”

  I thought I recognized the voice, even with blood finding its way into my ears. I had a feeling that if I could stand, and look in the mirror, I’d be horrified by what I saw.

  “Walden? It’s Don! Don Harwood!”

  I was right. I did know the voice. David’s father.

  Walden shouted: “Just a second!”

  He leaned in close to me, the gun inches from my bloodied nose. “I’m going to talk to him,” he whispered. “If you make one sound, even a peep, I will kill him. I’ll shoot him with your gun. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded.

  “You have those cuffs,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you carry those plastic cuffs around?”

  I barely managed a nod.

  “Get them out,” he said. Then, shouting: “Be right there, Don!”

  I struggled to get a hand into my pocket. I brought out one plastic cuff. Walden took one step back, keeping the gun trained on me. He was afraid to cuff me himself, probably fearing I’d try something. Which I would have.

  “Put your hand up against the leg,” he said. He was pointing to the thick porcelain leg that supported the pedestal sink. “Cuff your wrist to that.”

  That would keep me here in the bathroom, as opposed to cuffing my wrists together.

  I did as I was instructed, and secured my right hand to the leg. Both my hands were bloody, and I was leaving red handprints on the floor as I shifted my body. I had gone from a sitting position to being stretched out on the floor, my head between the sink and the toilet.

  “Remember,” he said. “One peep, and Don has to die, too. As it is, it only has to be you.”

  He turned on the tap and rinsed his and my blood from his hands, dried them off, then slipped out into the hall and closed the door.

  I lay there, 280 pounds of pain. With my free hand, I reached into my jacket and found my phone. I turned onto my side, blinked several times to get the blood out of my eyes so I could see the screen.

  The door reopened.

  Walden reached down and snatched the device from me. “I can’t believe I forgot that,” he said, and shut the door again.

  I closed my eyes, rested my head on the cold tile floor. My ear was not far from the crack at the bottom of the door, allowing me to hear what was going on.

  “Don, hey, how are you?” Walden said. “Sorry it took me so long.”

  “No, it’s okay. Am I catching you at a bad time?”

  “Well, I’m about to head out. Otherwise I’d invite you in.”

  “Oh, okay, well,” said Don, “I’ll try to make this quick, although it’s kind of a hard thing to say in a hurry.”

  “What’s hard to say?”

  A long pause. “Well, Walden, the thing is . . . I wanted to tell you this when you came by the other day. When I had to go to the school and pick up my grandson? It’s something that’s been eating at me for a long time.”

  “What?”

  “You see—God, this is hard to say—but you see, I was one of them.”

  Now it was Walden’s turn to pause. “One of them?”

  “I was down by the park that night. The night, you know, that Olivia . . . that she died.”

  “You were there?”

  “I heard what was happening. I don’t even know that there’s anything I could have done. I wasn’t close. But I could have done something. I could’ve called the cops, or I could’ve run into the park. I keep playing it over and over in my head, wondering what I could have done that might have made a difference. I don’t honestly think I could have saved her, Walden, but maybe, if I’d been a better person, if I’d done something, maybe I’d have seen the son of a bitch who did it.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I have to get it off my chest. It’s eating me up, Walden.”

  I thought about screaming. I thought about calling out for help. But I’d be killing Don Harwood. I couldn’t do that to him.

  Although I wondered, given what Don was confessing to, whether Walden would decide to kill him anyway. I was hurting so much on my side that I shifted to my stomach, my free hand sliding across the tile, coming into contact with something.

  I pulled on the leg of the sink, testing it, thinking maybe I could make it break free, that I could slip my hand out from the bottom. But the sound of the sink crashing to the floor was going to get Don killed as quickly as if I cried for help.

  Walden said, “It’s okay.”

  “No, Walden, it’s not okay. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’ll understand if you don’t, but I—”

  “Really, it’s okay. It was good of you to come by, Don.”

  “That’s it?” Don Harwood said.

  “Don’t give it another thought.”

  “Seriously? All this time, I’ve felt sick about this, and you don’t care?”

  “They caught the man today,” Walden said.

  “They did?”

  “I just—I just got a call from the police. They’ve caught someone.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. I had no—”

  A cell phone started ringing. Don said, “Hang on.” Then, “Hello? David? David, slow down. . . . What happened? You got what? You got shot? . . . No, you shot someone? Oh God, David, no . . . They couldn’t do anything? . . . Where are you? Tell me where you are. I’ll get your mother, and we’ ll—”

  “Don,” Walden said.

  “David, hang on a second.” A pause, and then, “Walden, I have to go. Something awful’s happened.”

  “Sure. It was good of you to come by.”

  “Yeah, well,” Don said. “I have to go.”

  I heard the door close.

  I had no idea what Don’s phone call was about, but whatever it was, it wasn’t a priority for me.

 
Would Walden shoot me? Would he kill me with my own gun? Unlikely, I thought. It would make too much noise. It would leave a bullet hole in the bathroom to be repaired. He’d have to do it another way. Strangle me, maybe. Suffocate me. Disable my other arm and hold his hand over my mouth and nose until I was dead.

  There’d be less mess that way.

  The real challenge would be getting rid of me. I was probably a hundred pounds heavier—at least—than George Lydecker. If this bathroom had a bathtub, he could dump me into it once I was dead and cut me into pieces. But if he wanted to treat me like a side of beef, he was going to have to move me someplace else to do it.

  Plus, there was the matter of my car out front. What was he going to do with that? I was hoping Don might have recognized it, asked Walden where I was. Then again, that probably would have gotten him killed. And now it sounded like Don had something else to worry about.

  I heard steps coming back down the hall. The door opened.

  “Did you hear that?” Walden asked. The gun was in his right hand. He must have hidden it when he was talking to Don.

  “I heard,” I said.

  “Everybody’s got problems,” he said offhandedly. “And you’re my latest one.” He looked at the way he had instructed me to cuff myself. “I screwed that up, didn’t I? I should have had you put both hands around the leg and hooked them up together. You have another cuff?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Take it out of your pocket.”

  “I can’t reach it with this hand. It’s in my other pocket.” Walden sighed. “Try.”

  I attempted to reach across my body into my opposite pocket, but I was like O. J. trying on the glove. I made it look a lot harder than it actually was.

  “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “Okay, don’t try anything funny,” he said. “Shift over that way.”

  I rolled back onto my other side to allow Walden to get into my pocket. My free hand went under my body, where I’d kept the item my hand had brushed past while he’d been talking to Don.

  He still had the gun in his hand, but it was pointed at the toilet and not at me. He fumbled around in my pocket with his left hand.

  I rolled.

  I rolled fast, and hard, and brought up my free hand, with the six-inch nail file clutched in my fist.

  I swung my arm with all the strength I had left in me and plunged it into Walden Fisher’s neck.

  Walden screamed and tumbled, then hit his head on the sink. The gun fell out of his hand.

  “Jesus!” he shouted.

  I pulled the nail file out and jammed it into him again, this time catching him at the base of his neck, just above the rib cage.

  And again.

  And again.

  Walden keeled over, his head hitting the opposite wall, a hand to his throat, his mouth wide, blood coming from everywhere. He stirred slightly, made one feeble attempt to grab for the gun that was just out of reach, made a noise that sounded like nuts and bolts rattling around in a can, and then he was gone.

  I lay there for several minutes, catching my own breath, waiting to see if he’d take another.

  He was dead.

  I shifted over as close as my tethered arm would let me, patted him down, trying to find my phone. As best I could tell, it wasn’t on him. So I crawled back to my original position, laid out on the floor on my back, one arm stretched out above my head, still attached to the sink.

  Someone would come, eventually. Or maybe, once I had some strength back, I’d yank that sink right off the goddamn wall.

  I closed my eyes, listening to my own breaths and the pulsing of my heart in my temples.

  Thought about Maureen. Thought about Trevor.

  Thought about cake.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank Carol Fitzgerald, Amy Black, John Aitchison, Kristen Cochrane, Michele Alpern, Louisa Macpherson, Helen Heller, Kara Welsh, Danielle Perez, Paige Barclay, Bill Massey, Ashley Dunn, Juliet Ewers, Spencer Barclay, Brad Martin, Eva Kolcze, Loren Jaggers, Sam Eades, and Heather Connor.

  And, as always, booksellers.

  ALSO BY LINWOOD BARCLAY

  No Safe House

  A Tap on the Window

  Never Saw It Coming

  Trust Your Eyes

  The Accident

  Never Look Away

  Fear the Worst

  Too Close to Home

  No Time for Goodbye

  PROMISE FALLS TRILOGY

  Broken Promise

  Far From True

  Copyright

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Orion Books

  Copyright © NJSB Entertainment Inc. 2016

  The right of Linwood Barclay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book, with the exception of those already in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 4653 7

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