Hobbled (30 page)

It took Luke a minute to get a grip on his fear, but when he did, he put his arms around both boys and pulled them close. That gave him courage. And it gave the boys courage too. Together they stepped determinedly around the rusty old furnace. And then, together, they drew in a collective gasp.

There was a little room back there. New concrete blocks had been laid to the ceiling in a square about ten feet by ten feet. There was a door into this tiny room, but it was flung wide at the moment.

The room was a cage.

Charles Strickland lay naked, handcuffed by one hand to a large iron ring buried in the concrete wall. He was filthy and looked nothing like the handsome young man Luke had seen on the news that night in his cap and gown, with the sparkle of a bright future glimmering in his eyes. This guy wasn’t anything like that guy. This guy had been through hell. Clearly. He had a filthy, bloody bandage loosely wrapped around one hand, and he cradled that hand close to his chest. The pain of his missing finger, his mutilated hand, was etched across his face.

Luke could see the ribs poking through the skin of his chest. He looked like he hadn’t eaten anything in a month. But that was impossible. He had only disappeared a few days ago.

The young man sat on the cold stone floor, his bare buttocks resting in a smear of blood.

As Luke stared at him, speechless, Charles Strickland stretched out a filthy hand and said, “Water. Please. I’m so thirsty.”

Then Strickland stared at the two boys still clinging to Luke like they were hanging from a cliff. Strickland seemed to have never seen such interesting creatures in his life. Luke found himself wondering if the young man was still sane.

“I was expecting a SWAT team,” Strickland croaked in his pain-addled voice, “not a fourth grade field trip.” The sound of his voice was almost lost beneath the raging of the storm.

“Hey!” DeVon countered, offended to the core. “We’re in the
fifth
grade.”

“Hush,” Luke said. He dropped to his knees in front of Strickland and the young man turned his wide, emotionless eyes to him as Luke tried to figure out how to extract his hand from the manacle.

“Where’s the key?” Luke gently asked, cupping Strickland’s chin in his fingers, trying to keep him focused, trying to make him understand. “If you tell me where the key is, I can get you out of here.”

And behind them, at the base of the stairs, a voice echoed loud and strong through the fetid air of the musty old basement.

“I assume you’re talking about
this
key.”

And amid a jangle of metal, Luke and the two boys spun to face the voice.

And the man who had uttered the words.

E
VEN
being cold and miserable and aching and hungry and worried to death about Luke’s safety, Danny somehow still managed to doze off as he sat there under the hedge. The storm raged around him; the ice-cold rain continually pelted his head; and Granger was spread out across his lap like a wet carpet, but none of it mattered. Danny was sound asleep. Only when his subconscious mind thought of Luke, out there somewhere, maybe facing danger, did Danny snap to attention and wake the hell up.

The minute he did, he peeked through the slats of the picket fence into Dinkens’s yard, and saw a shadow flitting along in front of the tumbledown garage in the back. And it was only because of a lucky flash of lightning at exactly the right moment he saw even
that.

Granger woke up when he sensed Danny grow tense beneath him. He crawled off Danny’s lap and Danny groaned as the blood shot back into his cramped legs.

“Holy shit, Granger! You’ve crippled me!”

He rubbed his legs and looked once again through the picket fence.

The shadow was gone.

Danny looked around to make sure no one was watching, and with another groan, he grabbed the fence and pulled himself to his feet. As the blood dribbled down into his blood-starved arteries, Danny thought he had never felt such pain in his life. Even breaking his leg didn’t compare to it.

Finally, after a couple of minutes, the pain turned to relief and he was able to stand it. The pins and needles went away a couple of minutes after that.

He gazed around. First at his yard, then at Dinkens’s yard, then toward the street out front. He saw no one. Not a soul.

He awkwardly flung his broken leg across the picket fence first, then he followed it with his good leg. Then he reached back over the fence and scooped his arms under Granger and lifted him over to set him at his feet.

“Stay!” Danny commanded, and Granger stood by his side, although he was trembling in his eagerness to run. Danny had never realized until that moment just how well trained Luke’s dog really was. Well, good. It would make things easier.

“Heel, boy,” Danny whispered, and together they moved as quietly as they could through the storm, hugging the fence, staying low, heading for Dinkens’s backyard.

Danny was really limping now. He couldn’t help wondering if he had done permanent damage to his broken leg. Not to mention the fact his bare feet were killing him too. Christ, sometimes he had no sense at all, coming out here barefoot and all.

He stuck his head around the corner of Dinkens’s house and saw the back porch. He headed for it without even thinking, wanting to get out of the rain. At least for a couple of minutes. The lightning was still flashing and the thunder was still banging around up in the sky, but Danny thought maybe the storm was beginning to taper off.

He stepped up onto the porch with a grunt and Granger hopped up beside him, limber as a fox.

Granger immediately crossed the porch and stood staring off the other side.

Danny tilted his head and listened. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could hear someone banging around over there in the shadows. He wondered how close he could get to them before he was spotted and all hell broke loose.

The thing was, that shadow he had seen crossing in front of Dinkens’s garage earlier, well, that wasn’t Luke. No way. And it wasn’t either of the kids either. Danny was sure it wasn’t.

But the funny thing was—it was too short to be Dinkens too.

So just who the hell was it stumbling around in the dark out here with the rest of them?

And why did Danny have a really bad feeling gnawing away at his guts about the way this whole damn night was turning out?

He carefully stepped off the far side of the porch, with Granger following, and approached the sounds he could still hear in the shadows ahead. He bent and picked up a goodly sized rock that struck his poor toe when his toe wasn’t looking. He didn’t know who the enemy was up ahead, but at least now he had a weapon to defend himself with.

And then it hit him. Almost like a bolt of lightning.

He looked down. His ankle monitor was flashing
red!

M
R
. D
INKENS
didn’t look anything like he had the first time Luke saw him. He wasn’t properly dressed for one thing. He was wrapped up in a ratty old plaid bathrobe, his bare feet, under white hairless ankles, were stuffed in an old pair of house slippers that had most certainly seen better days. There was a towel draped around his shoulders, and his hair was wet. He had obviously just been outside not more than a few minutes earlier, and everyone in the room knew what he had been doing.

There were scratches up and down Dinkens’s shins like he’d been savaged by a dog. He saw Luke staring at them.

“Fucker likes to kick,” Dinkens said, tilting his head at Strickland.

“Water,” Strickland said.

And Dinkens smiled a nasty little smile.

To Luke’s surprise it was Bradley who seemed really pissed about the whole thing. “You killed your wife.”

Dinkens looked down at the kid as he stepped off the stairs and moved closer. “And your point is—?”

“She made us cookies. She was nice.”

“She was a pig, kid. She looks like four hundred pounds of bread dough in that damn tub. Didn’t you see her? Besides she was getting suspicious about my little hobby. Had to get rid of her. Not to mention the fact that it was costing a fortune to feed her. That woman could
eat.
”

DeVon took a crack at the bastard. “You killed the cat too. Why’d you kill the cat?”

“Hate cats,” he said, and left it at that. “Hate kids, too, so watch your mouth.”

Then, with a blink of his eyes, he dismissed both Bradley and DeVon and turned to Luke.

“I was coming after you next, kiddo. I had no intention of playing the game with anyone so close to home, but you’re just too tempting not to have a taste of. Fooling around with the kid next door, aren’t you? Maybe I’ll take both of you at once. Make you perform. That might be interesting.” He looked back at the kids. “But first these little fuckers have to go.”

Luke dragged the boys behind him. He stepped in front of them, wondering how he would protect them if, God forbid, Dinkens pulled out a gun.

But before he could find out
what
Dinkens had in mind, a gust of wind swept through the basement, scattering leaves and dust bunnies at their feet. The sound of the storm outside was suddenly a lot nearer, a lot louder.

Someone had opened the trapdoor.

Dinkens seemed to have been expecting it. “And here’s your boyfriend, right on cue,” he said with a lazy smile.

With Luke and the boys standing in front of the little light burning inside Strickland’s cage, the basement was a lot darker than it had been before. All four of them heard footsteps descending the concrete steps beneath the trapdoor, shuffling footsteps, but they couldn’t see who it was.

Luke was praying to God it wasn’t Danny. But praying or not, he was really surprised to learn that it actually
wasn’t
Danny.

“Arthur, you always were an asshole. Let those kids go.”

Luke couldn’t believe it. It was Mrs. Trumball.

She stepped out of the stairway and placed herself in the light for all to see. She was still in her faded housecoat and bunny slippers, and if anything, Luke thought her makeup looked worse than it had when they saw her earlier, probably thanks to the rain. She was clutching a gin bottle in her hand.

She was sopping wet.

Luke had never been so happy to see anyone in his life.

Dinkens seemed to feel differently about it. “Lord, Ruth, don’t you ever take your hair out of those fucking rollers,” and with that, Dinkens raised his hand. In it he held a revolver.

“Put that gun down!”
a male voice bellowed from the staircase Dinkens had just come down. Dinkens whirled around and took a pot shot at whoever the hell was back there, but he knew he’d missed. Then he swung around and fired a shot at Mrs. Trumball.

He blew one of her rollers clean off her head. And most of the hair along with it.

“Aaarrgghh!” Outraged, Mrs. Trumball bellowed like a bull. She hauled back and flung the half-f bottle of gin across the basement with such force, and with such deadly accuracy, that when it hit Dinkens in the head, his dentures went flying out of his mouth and landed at Luke’s feet.

“Yuk,” DeVon said. “Teeth.”

Bradley pointed to the stairs leading up to the house, and the two men standing on it.

“Who the heck are
they?”

A
T
THE
sound of the first gunshot, Danny went stumbling across Dinkens’s backyard, swinging his cast back and forth like a wrecking ball trying to keep it out of his way as he blinked away the rain and tried to locate where the sound came from. He knew it was a shot. He just didn’t know who was shooting. Or exactly where it came from. Or who was the target. He just prayed to God it wasn’t Luke.

He snagged his cast on a pile of rusty metal fence posts and went flying. He landed on the posts, causing one holy hell of a racket. All of the fence posts had sharp edges at one end, and they took most of the skin from Danny’s palms when he hit them.

He hardly noticed. He was back on his feet, still running full out on his long, gangly legs, or as full out as the cast would allow. He was still trying to locate the source of the gunshot. Panic was setting in. Where was Luke?

In a flash of lightning that came about two seconds too late, Danny saw the flung open trapdoor materialize beneath his feet at about the very same moment he plunged through the opening with a scream. He hit the concrete steps at an angle, and in a puff of plaster dust, his cast burst open like a piñata. Danny screamed again because that motherfucker
hurt.

He grabbed his broken leg which was now barely protected by the shattered remnants of the cast. He tried desperately to shield it from more injury as he went tumbling down the remaining steps like a rag doll. At the bottom, he hit Mrs. Trumball full in the back and sent them both sprawling. Luckily, they landed in a pile of discarded clothing. The only truly disturbing aspect of their landing was the fact about twenty rats went running for their lives from beneath the pile of clothes where they had apparently been holding an Alanon meeting or something.

“Look,” DeVon screeched happily. “Rats!”

“Ooh,” Mrs. Trumball snarked. “Vermin!”

“Please get off my leg,” Danny requested of her as politely as he could. Then he passed out.

Across the room, Dinkens clawed his way to his feet. He still had the gun in his hand, but before he could lift it and aim it and take another pot shot at somebody, Luke made a running tackle and took him down again. The two of them wrestled across the basement floor, Luke trying to get the gun away, Dinkens trying to shoot him with it. It was about then the two strangers Bradley had never seen before came tromping all the way down the staircase from inside the house and jumped into the fray.

One of the men was tall and dark and handsome, and the other was shorter and redheaded and
just
as handsome. It was a funny thing, Bradley had time to think, but they looked a lot like Danny and Luke.

The taller man must have played football in school. When he kicked Mr. Dinkens in the head, it was all Bradley could do not to throw his arms in the air and scream, “Field goal!”