___________________________
The endgame was fast approaching.
Glorious, like sunlight breaking through after a thunderstorm.
Everything he’d put in place over the past few months was about to pay off. Big style.
Players converging toward an inescapable checkmate.
From his vantage point high on the third floor, he watched the Celebrity Cop work his way up the snowy shingle toward the house.
After months of planning, his archenemy was exactly where he wanted him.
Here to save the day.
Rushing in where angels feared to tread.
Pity he couldn’t even save himself.
___________________________
Two thoughts were battling it out for dominance in my brain: there were others in Engel’s place and my son’s body was probably in there, too.
As for what Locklear and Engel were up to, I couldn’t even hazard a guess. It probably wasn’t any of my business. But in trying to kill me – for whatever the reason – they’d made it mine.
The house was in darkness.
The steel front door was locked and dead bolted.
I worked my way down the side, slipping and sliding around the large snow drift reaching a third way to the roof. The edges of my perceptions were still blurry in the wake of the drugs used to keep me sleepy. I placed the gun on the ground, scooped up a double handful of snow and scrubbed it over my face. Gasped at the chill, then shook off the excess.
Better.
No more compliance from this end.
I picked up the gun and came round back. Scanned the deserted yard. Without the deafening music that had scrambled brain cells the last time round, I could hear the throaty hum of the generator in the big shed in the corner, and the murmur of restless dogs in the long caged lean-to.
The outbuildings were in darkness.
There was a pair of bright white rectangles projected on the frozen mud in the middle of the yard. I looked up at the back of the house, to see two illuminated windows on the third floor: my destination.
At ground level, the steel roller shutter leading to the carpenter’s workshop was two-thirds of the way up. No lights on inside. I started toward it, then froze to the spot.
A big guy in a three-quarter leather jacket had emerged from the workshop and had bounded out into the middle of the yard. Brutus. A white-skinned grizzly with a shaven head. He’d swapped the stun gun for a snubnosed revolver – a thirty-eight special – which was sweeping across the shadowy backyard in time with his gaze.
He must have heard my noisy scuffle with Locklear and come out to investigate. What were they up to here?
No time to ponder. Right now, I was a sitting duck. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run. One bullet and no fair fight.
Suddenly his sink-hole gaze found me and he barked something in a foreign tongue. Sounded Russian. I wasn’t intimate with the language, but I got its meaning.
He raised his weapon.
Mine was already pointing at his big gut. No time to take better aim. I squeezed off the remaining bullet in Locklear’s gun. The resounding crack spooked the dogs in their caged run and they went mad, barking and howling and gnashing at the wire.
But the big Russian bear looked unharmed. Bewildered, but still on his feet. I saw him feel around his waistline, as if wondering what had happened to the bullet.
I didn’t wait for him to regroup.
I charged him down.
The golden rule in any such close quarter combat situation is to use your opponent’s weaknesses to your advantage. Like most hired muscle, this brute was top-heavy. An inverted triangle. One of those bench-pressing nightclub bouncers bloated on anabolic steroids. I pulled my head in and went for his waist.
He wasn’t prepared.
My shoulder made the tackle. It was like running headlong into a tree trunk. I knuckled down into his thighs and heaved, using momentum to sweep his legs from under him. He tried to counteract, bring the revolver crashing down on my back, but gravity had other plans. His legs came up as I bulldozed through to the other side. Floundered on my knees as he toppled to the ground behind me. The bigger they are the harder they fall. I heard the air slam from his lungs and the revolver clatter across the yard.
Suddenly I had the advantage.
I spun round and hooked bound wrists over his head. Pulled hard until I had the plastic ties garroting his throat. Him or me. His head came up and he let loose a mean howl, started thrashing against the frozen dirt. I hung on, with the tie wraps biting into my flesh and his. Then the goliath was pushing himself up, onto his knees, and for a moment I was a daredevil rodeo rider on the back of an incensed bull. He didn’t stop. He staggered to his feet with me dangling down his back. No way I could get loose. I swung and kneed him weakly in his side. He didn’t even flinch. His big paws reached over his shoulders and grabbed my forearms. Fingers like steel talons. Seemingly effortlessly, he hoisted me up and over his head. Then I was sailing through the air. I twisted and hit the side of the wire cage containing Engel’s hell hounds. A half dozen sets of snapping teeth chomped at the wire next to my face. Saliva flying. Claws scratching the mesh. Maddened mutts trying to break out and tear me to shreds.
The Russian bear was coming at me.
I was pinned down. Breathing hard. Senses spiraling from the collision with the cage. No escape.
Was this it? Was I destined to die in another backyard brawl, here in the freezing snow of Deadman Bay?
Thick fingers reached down to snap my neck.
I reacted without thinking. Survival instinct kicking in.
I flung my foot skyward. Right between his legs. Aiming the toe of my sneaker into the soft nerve bundle behind his testicles. It was a last desperate lash out. A puny attempt to hit his Achilles heel and bring him down, or at least buy me enough time to find the revolver and even the odds.
Brutus straightened and released a reverberating howl. The dogs joined in the chorus. Going crazy against the mesh.
I spied my chance. Rolled aside and scrambled to my feet. Scanned the yard for the gun. No such luck. Too many deep shadows and ruts in the mud.
The big brute was clutching his crotch and firing off Russian expletives. Face screwed into a ball. Only a matter of seconds before he recovered and came after me to finish the job.
I needed a weapon. Anything.
The Russian bear snarled and started his advance.
I grabbed up the nearest thing to hand – a weighty propane cylinder – and slung it hopelessly at his head.
He caught it in his big paws.
I was doomed.
But the impetus was enough to knock him off balance. He staggered backward with the cylinder held above his head. I didn’t give him the chance to recover. I rushed at him, pushing with all my remaining strength in the direction of the dog cage. No way I was about to let him crush my skull. His heels hit the lean-to and his feet lifted off the ground. I kept pushing. His legs came up and his hips seesawed on the edge of the caged run. Then he went down like a falling wall. The combined weight of the gas cylinder and his spinning top physique proved too much for the wire roof. His bald head and broad shoulders broke through, and the furious hounds were on him in a flash.
I backed away as his blood-curdling screams rang out across the backyard. I saw him thrash at the mesh, trying futilely to disengage himself from the wire trap.
By the time I’d reached the workshop, all I could hear was the mushy sound of hungry dogs feasting.
___________________________
Inside the dark workshop, I took a moment to gather my wits and my breath. But only a moment.
It was my thinking that Brutus wasn’t here for the guided tour. Hired muscle usually came ahead of their hirers. I needed to arm myself, and fast.
In the dark, I fumbled around the workbenches and machinery until my hands closed on the circular saw. I rubbed the plastic ties against the teeth until I was free. Massaged screaming wrists. Then I picked up an ax on my way to the steps leading into the house.
I wanted my son’s body back.
___________________________
The short hallway reeked of gasoline. An invisible fog of noxious fumes capable of shredding lungs.
I stifled a cough and kept my breathing shallow.
Same toxic vapors in the crisscrossing corridor.
Someone had splashed gasoline all over the walls and the floor. Carcinogenic chemicals irritating the airways.
I took it easy in the dark, heading for the foot of the staircase. Even so, I bumped into something blocking the way. It was weighty, stout, metallic. A propane gas cylinder – like the one I’d thrown at Brutus. Deathly cold to the touch. I pushed past it. Came to the head of the main hallway and glanced down it toward the big front door. Even in the dark I could make out several more propane cylinders, positioned against the wooden columns supporting the upper floors.
Someone intended to raise hell here. One spark and the whole place would go up like a rocket on New Year’s Eve.
I didn’t want to be around when that happened.
I continued to the staircase, bumping around another gas canister, and took the stairs two at a time.
I didn’t know what I was expecting to find, or who.
More henchmen, maybe. Their big bad boss, hopefully.
My captors had brought me here for a reason – not just to reclaim my son’s corpse.
More darkness on the second floor. Looked like all the previously locked doors were now wide open. The caustic odor was less concentrated up here; I breathed a little easier. I ran to the stairs at the far end and kept going up. Same on the third floor – except for a pool of light spilling out into the hallway about halfway down.
Two of the rooms were occupied and lit up.
I could hear muffled voices. All male. One with a distinct Russian accent.
I hefted the ax and walked toward the light. I must have looked like a deranged madman prowling down that hallway. Sodden with snow. Skin reddened with the cold and a fight to the death. Blood on my cheek. One of those rare moments where I could have misquoted Jack Nicholson from
The Shining
and gotten away with it.
I glanced in shadowy rooms as I passed them by. No Overlook Hotel, this. More like the hostel from hell. Impressions of bare mattresses on bare timber floors. Coiled chains and slop buckets. Stout iron bars on windows, and the words
abandon hope all ye who enter here
hanging in the air.
I came to the pool of light and stopped on the threshold of the first doorway. Peeped cautiously inside.
The illumination came from a long florescent strip bulb protected by a wire grille . Its bleaching glow revealing several single mattresses heaped on their sides against a wall. No linens. No bedroom furniture. No breakfast trays with leftovers and tips for good housekeeping.
Three people.
Two were men. They were looking through the barred window, with their backs to me. The third was a women. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, her head tilted toward her lap, so that her fiery hair cascaded in thick swags over her shoulders.
Rae!
Fire surged through my system.
There was a manacle on her left wrist, I saw, attached to a chain running through a metal loop bolted to the floor.
I’d been too busy dealing with Engel, Locklear and their dancing Russian bear to even consider the possibility of her being here.
But here she was.
Alive!
But why was she here, in Engel’s home?
Snakeskin had burned my boy’s body on the beach at Akhiok. Engel had taken charge of the recovered corpse. Then he’d absconded with it after I’d returned to Kodiak. Later, Snakeskin had abducted Rae from her home by the sea. Engel had then used his motor yacht to ferry us all here from the mainland.
My dead son connected them both.
None of it answered
why
.
Rae must have sensed me gawping, because her face lifted enough to allow her teary eyes to meet mine. She had scarlet bruising on one side of her face and around her eye, a strip of silver duct tape across her mouth. More dried blood in her scalp.
My fingers tightened around the ax handle.
Someone was about to pay for hurting her.
Then cold steel pressed against the side of my neck.
“Don’t.” A single word, breathed against my ear.
Engel.
He’d somehow survived his shooting and pulled the dagger out of Locklear’s eye socket, brains and all. Now he had that knife pressed hard against my throat, drawing blood. If I moved so much as a fraction of an inch the blade would slice straight through my jugular.
Déjà vu.
Engel reached around and relieved me of the ax. Tossed it into the corner of the room.
The sudden clatter caused the two men to turn our way.
And that’s when the situation went from bad to absurd.