Authors: EC Sheedy
Noah opened the door for Joe and stepped aside for him to enter. Chance was at his side. The big mutt, obviously well trained, stopped barking immediately on Bristol’s command. Now, his tail was sweeping the air in a friendly greeting. Joe ruffled the dog’s head. “Where’s April?” he asked.
“With Phylly. Talking.”
“I’ll bet.”
Better her than me.
He’d spent the last couple of hours pushing Phyllis Worth and that stricken look she’d laid on him as far out of his mind as he could, concentrating his efforts on his job, which meant deciding either to wait here in some kind of last stand—or get the hell out of here. No contest.
“You want a drink?” Noah asked.
“Sure. A beer if you’ve got one.” Joe’s casual tone hid his concern, as he intended it would. The one thing he’d learned in his years of protecting people was that it never paid to panic them. You did that, they stopped listening, started getting stupid—and started getting dead.
Joe followed the older man into the kitchen, his nerves hosting a high-wire act. He didn’t need a beer, he needed to get everyone out of here. Now. Before it got even darker. Joe’s walk had covered the close perimeters of the property. It was too large to get beyond that in the time he had, but he’d seen enough to confirm the location was vulnerable. Their only choice was to get out of Dodge—as quickly as possible. Before that fog growing out there made things even worse.
He considered going in that bedroom and dragging the two women out, but he’d rather face a fuckin’ firing squad. He’d do it when he had to, but not a minute before. And get Bristol on board before he made a move.
Seconds after Noah produced a couple of chilled Coronas, the two men were sitting on a long sofa.
“That must have been tough.” Noah took a swig of beer. “Meeting your mother after all this time.”
“Went pretty much the way I expected it to,” Joe said, seeing no reason not to be upfront about it. Whatever residue of strangeness he’d had upon meeting Phyllis Worth, hours of walking in the woods had erased. Nothing had changed. She was still a stranger to him. There’d been no surprises, no tugs at long-buried heartstrings, no instant mother/son bonding. Nothing. He’d felt nothing. Exactly what he’d felt when he’d finally accepted she’d dumped him for good. They’d met. It was done.
Somewhere along the way, when the time was right, he’d have his say, get a few questions answered, and that would be it. Case closed.
“Do you know why she left you like she did?” Noah said.
Joe swigged his beer. Time for a change of subject. “No, and right now it’s the least of my concerns.” He waved his beer to encompass the airy glass room. “No offense, Bristol, but this is the perfect place to do a little human target practice. It’ll be like shooting fish in an aquarium.” He set his unfinished beer on the table. “So I’d appreciate it if you’d go in there”—he jerked his head toward the bedroom— “and get them out. We should leave before the fog cuts us off.”
Noah looked at him, his expression skeptical, the look of a quiet man leading a quiet life, who can’t grasp an evil that would interfere with it. “You’re sure that’s necessary?”
“I’m sure.”
Noah studied his face a second or two longer, slowly nodded his head. “Then I’d better—” He broke off, glanced at his dog.
Chance, who, when the two men sat down with their beers, had curled up in front of the dark fireplace and settled into a luxurious sleep suddenly got up and padded toward the southern wall, his gait unhurried, but his head high. Alert.
Joe tried to follow the dog’s line of vision to outside the glass, but with the lamp on inside, it was impossible.
Chance growled low in his throat.
“Douse the lamp,” he said to Noah. “And hit the floor.” Joe slid from the couch to the carpet and Noah did the same, snapping the light off as he went down. There was still enough daylight that the room wasn’t totally dark, but grayness had enveloped the house like a shroud, making it impossible to see anything beyond the deck.
Chance, still at the window, went crazy—barking, growling, hurling himself at the glass.
April opened the bedroom door, the light behind her. “What’s happ—”
Joe, staying low, propelled himself across the room and took her to the floor, covering her with his body. He saw his mother through the open doorway, starting to get off the bed. “Get down,” he shouted at her. “And stay down.” She obeyed instantly.
Thank God.
Outside, a shot was fired. Chance freaked, running back and forth along the glass, teeth bared, mouth gaping and frothing.
“Chance,” Noah yelled. “No! Come. Chance. Come!”
The dog stopped barking and moved toward Noah, but he whined like a mad thing, and Noah had a bitch of a time settling him down. While calming the dog, Noah pulled himself along the floor to where Phylly lay curled in a ball beside the bed. He turned off the single bedside light, plunging the house into deep shadow.
Beneath Joe, April squirmed and shoved at his chest. He gave her some wiggle room by shifting his weight to her side, then he edged them both toward the base of the sofa. Propped against it, he pulled out his gun and released the safety.
“What’s happening?” April said, her voice raspy as though she were struggling to get her breath. Shit, he’d probably damn near smothered her.
A second shot answered her question. Glass shattered somewhere above them.
Chance, who Joe could see through the bedroom door lying beside Noah and Phyllis, whined and fell quiet, waiting.
April pressed herself to his side, shuddered.
They all waited. Listened.
A long silence grew in the glass house, an eye of utter calm.
“Bristol,” Joe said. “Is there a phone in there?”
“Yes.”
“Get to it. Call nine-one-one. You on that grid this far out?”
“Yes, but it’s quicker to call the locals.”
“Do it.” Joe’s eyes adjusted to the bad light. He watched Bristol pull himself around the bed, saw his hand reach up to the night table, grope for the phone. Tightening his grip on April, he waited.
“The phone’s dead,” Noah called from the bedroom. “No dial tone.”
“Shit.” Joe rifled in his pocket and got his cell. He cursed again.
“What?” April asked, lifting her head, which he immediately pushed down.
“No service. Chances are we’ve been jammed.” Whoever was out there had come prepared.
“Which means?” April whispered from beside him.
We’re fucked.
“Which means we get creative.”
Or we die . . .
Chapter 29
Quinlan reentered the living room from his bedroom, just as Mercy’s cell phone rang. He’d heard her come back, but hadn’t stirred himself, having no desire to spend any more time with her than was necessary. He carried his rifle, still in its sleeve.
Mercy listened for a time, then smiled. “Cool. Good job, Char. We’ll see you ASAP.” She clicked off, stuffed the phone in one of the pockets in her hunting vest, one much like his own.
When she looked at Q, the smile left her face. “We’re good to go. They’re all there, and Charity has them pinned down.” She pulled an automatic handgun from inside her jacket, another from the back of her waist. Both were Glocks and both were equipped with silencers. She handed him one. “She says the situation couldn’t be better. We should be in and out in fifteen minutes.”
Q slipped the revolver into an inside pocket. A fine weapon the Glock—especially equipped with a silencer. He said nothing, and he asked no questions, because he had none. He knew exactly how things would play out. “Fine.” Glancing at the rifle in his hand, she gave him an odd, somewhat wary glance, before going to the window. Lifting the blind, she peered outside, where darkness and fog had fallen like a curtain.
A perfect night for murder.
Mercy dropped the blind. “As we expected, there are four people in the house, two women, two men. Charity has cut off the phones and immobilized their cars. She also fired a couple of shots to make sure they stay put. She says they’ve doused the lights and are now sitting there in the dark—probably shitting their pants—all ready for us.” Again her ugly smile, her eyes bright with anticipated violence. “She’ll keep them there until our arrival. There’s one problem. She waited to call us until she was certain they’d tried their cells and because the jammer’s battery is weak—so if they keep trying their phones, they might get lucky.”
“Then we should go. Now.”
She grabbed the car keys and Q followed her out of the cabin.
Five minutes later they were through what passed for a town, and fifteen minutes after that, they were maybe three-quarters of the way up Bristol’s narrow pockmarked road. When they came to a wider section, Mercy turned the car until it faced the direction they came in on and turned it off. “We’ll walk in from here,” she said. “Charity’s up ahead, on the west side of the road, not far from the house. She says we won’t see her, but she’ll see us. She didn’t want to say more because she didn’t want to risk leaving the jammer off to continue her call.”
They stepped out of the car into the cold moisture-laden air coming off the Pacific. The day’s final weakening light fought the massive shadows of the trees, the clouded sky, and lost. Their world was nothing but shifting shadows. Quinlan had never known such darkness, but he liked it, he decided. Liked the possibilities of it, the sins it would hide.
Mercy pulled her jacket’s hood over her head. “Jesus, doesn’t this stupid place know what the fuck time of year it is?”
Q winced at her foul language. “It’s the northern Pacific—not Malibu. It doesn’t come with summer guarantees. You have flashlights, I presume?” Quinlan asked, slipping his rifle from its case.
She reached back into the front seat of the Explorer. “Here.” She handed him one, kept one for herself.
Q shoved the flashlight in a chest pocket of his vest. He’d use it only if he had to, preferring to let his eyes adjust to the dark. He patted his right pocket, confirmed the hard weight of the Glock resting there.
“Go ahead,” he said, making a play of putting his rifle case in the car. “I’m right behind you.”
She didn’t move. “I’ll bet you are,” she said. He couldn’t see her face clearly, but he knew it was set to hard. She went on, “And if you’re thinking I’m disposable about now—think again. Charity expects to see my face. If she doesn’t you’re a dead man. You got that?”
“Understood. And rest assured I have no death wish. Now shall we go? There is the problem with the jammer, remember?”
Mercy stuffed her gun in her jacket, shot a beam of light on the rutted path—the rising fog making the light virtually useless—and went ahead of him up the road. No doubt confident her threat had sufficiently terrified him into obliging docility. It was amazing how wrong a person could be.
Q withdrew the Glock from his pocket and shot her in the back.
His reward was the sound of her body thudding face forward onto the gravel road. He put his moccasin-clad foot on her head, and ground her face into the sharp stones. He wouldn’t give her the grace of being a beautiful corpse. “No one threatens Quinlan Braid,” he murmured, savoring the hard powerful beat of his heart, the ease of his one-handed kill. “No one.”
Shoving the Glock back in his pocket, he shifted the Winchester to a more balanced position in his left hand—he didn’t like carry-straps—and strode up the road.
Unlike Mercy his back was well protected.
April, Phylly, and Noah were propped up like dolls around the base of the bed in Noah’s bedroom. Joe, demanding they stay silent, stayed near the bedroom door, and listened intently for any sound behind it. As did April, but all she heard was nature’s mood music; the ocean’s endless communion with the shore, soft but relentless, dulled by the night’s mist and fog.
Noah had secured the patio sliders and pulled the blackout drapes on the outside wall of the bedroom that backed onto the dense forest. The bedroom’s inner walls, thick glass brick, provided them all the protection they’d get. Not a hell of a lot. And whoever—whatever—was out there was keeping a close watch, firing another shot into Noah’s second floor office just minutes ago.
April, sitting on the floor, her back against the bed, fought the invading, slithering darkness. They huddled in a brackish world, shadows to each other—a world growing blacker by the minute.
Basement black. Cellar black.
April had forgotten . . .
Forgotten how the dark pervaded, made her heart pound with a fearful expectancy. It was unknowable, the dark. It clawed at you, caged you as easily as iron bars.
As easily as a locked cellar door.
Joe, staying low, left the door and came toward them, gun in hand. When he was close enough, he put his strong hand on April’s knee and squeezed it. “You doing okay?”
His gesture was reassuring, briefly making her forget the dark—the danger outside. She put her hand over his and squeezed back. “I am now.”
“Hang in there,” he whispered. “We’ll get out of this.”
“I know.”
If Joe was right, and she prayed he was,
April thought,
she’d come full circle, first Phylly taking her from the dark, now her son.
Joe’s tone turned brusque when he said, “Jesus, Bristol, you must have a weapon of some kind. A rifle maybe?”
“No. I told you. Nothing,” Noah answered.
He cursed softly. Other than getting them all into the bedroom, telling them to be quiet and keep low, Joe had barely said a word since the first shot was fired—except for the first time he’d asked Noah this same question. Now April sensed impatience, knew his mind was testing ideas, turning over plans, looking for a way out. His silence was deep, but deadly. This was a whole new Joe, no wisecracks, no easy smiles—just focused determination. When she touched his shoulder, his muscles were drum-tight.
“I have a gun,” Phylly said. “A Kahr 9 millimeter. It’s in my bag.”
“Why the hell didn’t you say so?” Joe said.
“I didn’t hear you asking before.” She matched his brusque tone, but still sounded defensive. “Things were a little chaotic after all.”