Glass House (41 page)

Finn cut her off. He took her by the
shoulders. He leaned in and spoke only inches from her face.
“Listen to me. No one’s there.”

The pounding below them escalated. It was
louder, and on a particularly booming sound, it was punctuated with
a deep cracking noise.

“We need to go
now
,” Finn said.

They kicked the screen out and bent through
the window, one at a time. They stepped onto the roof, the night
dark around them.

The
Chrysler with the Pushbutton Shift

They moved as quickly as they could go
without falling off. Across the porch roof, their feet scraping and
slipping against the shingles. Over to the corner.

They heard the door to the attic give way as
they got there. As far away as they were, they could pick out the
crashing sound of the door breaking open and falling in, followed
by pounding footsteps on the stairs inside.

The ground was too far below them. A twisted
or broken ankle or knee, and it’d be a short run. But the walnut
tree was within reach.

I wanted it gone
, Megan thought
.
Where would we be then?

“Go,” Finn was saying, but Megan wasn’t
waiting. She jumped, arms out and wrapping around a wide bough as
she hit hard enough that the wind was knocked out of her. She
tightened as much as she could, pulling herself higher until she
was certain she wouldn’t fall. Then she slipped down, dangled and
looked to the ground, and dropped in a roll.

Finn followed the same way. Over to the tree
bough, steadying himself, checking and dropping.

They both heard the two men as Finn was
picking himself up. They were coming from different directions now.
Megan saw Waldoch on the porch roof above them, and Finn looked
over and caught Chilcott, hitting the porch and straight-arming the
screen door open.

Megan and Finn were already running toward
the back of the house as Waldoch’s shot bit into the walnut’s
trunk. They were almost there when Chilcott came around the corner
and jogged in a reeling gait after them.

“In there!” Finn said. They hit the side
door of the garage and flung it open, spun and shut it tight. Megan
slid a chain lock and stepped on a floor bolt. She flinched and
ducked as a shot punched a small hole through the wooden door,
spraying her cheek with splinters.

“Help me,” she said, pointing at the chest
freezer along the wall on that side of the garage. She moved
quickly to the far end and bent her shoulder to it, Finn
positioning himself beside her. They struggled together to push it,
the chest screeching against the cement floor of the garage. Ben’s
tools, stacked on top, jostled until the freezer was snugly in
place.

“What about that one?” Finn asked, nodding
toward the lift door.

“It’s on an opener. It’s already
locked.”

“So let’s get in and go.”

“Get in what and go
where?
”

“The car,” Finn said. “We get in. We
go.
”

“Because I can start a car with my
fingernail?”

Finn stared blankly at her.

“I don’t have the goddamn keys!”

Another gunshot at the side door stopped any
reply he had. The knob shattered and broke, its handle falling
loose but not dropping. The garage light was on when they came in,
but Megan reached to the switch and shut it off. She collected a
flashlight from the top of the freezer.

Whoever was on the other side threw a hip to
the door, but the bolt at the bottom and the freezer behind it
held. Then came the voice. It was soft. Polite. Like someone
outside a bathroom, who didn’t want to bother but really needed
in.

“Megan,” Waldoch said. He was there, his
hand tapping at the door. “Dear,” he added.

The lift door trembled, too. Chilcott,
testing it. Checking to see how to get through.

“We seem to have come to an impasse,”
Waldoch was saying. “But it is, unfortunately, an impasse primarily
for you.”

He bumped the door again. The locks held but
the door shook.

Chilcott was tugging at the one in front. It
rattled.

Megan and Finn didn’t make a sound. She
clicked the flashlight on. Finn’s hand was at his head, pressing
against the bleeding gash Chilcott had given him in the house.

“Ideas?” Megan whispered.

“There’s no point in this,” Waldoch said
quietly from outside, as though he’d heard her. “You’ve really no
place to go, you realize.”

Finn shook his head at her. “You?”

Megan was studying the tools on the freezer.
She ran a hand over them, touching them one by one, checking for
something, for anything. Screwdrivers, a wrench, a hammer, an ax. A
bag of washers and nails. Coils of solder.

She picked the solder up. Unwound the end of
it. Looked over the tools again, searching. Aimed the flashlight
around the garage, searching more.

“Maybe,” she whispered. “Clear that off.”
She pointed at the freezer but went to the front of the car.

Finn started to pull the tools off the
freezer. He set them aside, one by one.

“Move faster,” Megan said. “Neatness isn’t
gonna matter.” Finn swept the tools off.

There were two wall-mounted cabinets at the
front of the garage. Ben had bought them in a spurt of ambition
about cleaning the garage, but he hadn’t really used them. He’d
never gotten the time.

Megan opened the cabinets, sorting through
the few things that were there. Then she saw what she wanted.

She dropped the solder on the ground and
reached into the cabinet to pull out the blowtorch that went with
it. She angled the flashlight in and found the torch lighter, too.
She took that as well.

“Jeremy?” she said as she collected them.
She turned and saw Finn beside the freezer. He was spotlighted in
the flashlight’s glow, his eyes wide at her mention of Waldoch’s
name.

The patient knocking stopped. Chilcott’s
tugging at the lift door stopped.

“I want to talk.” Megan waited a beat.
“We’ll come out, but promise me we can talk.”

Two more beats. Finn’s eyes were wider,
waiting.

She went to him. “Open it,” she whispered in
his ear. She pointed at the freezer. Finn unlatched the top and
lifted the lid. “Get in.”

Finn looked at her, bewildered, but Megan
nodded. He stepped over the freezer’s wall and into the cavernous
chest.

“Fine,” Waldoch was saying. “We’ll talk.”
Megan could hear the lie in it as much as she could hear the
success.

“We need to move some things away from the
door,” she said before adding, in a whisper not even Finn could
hear, “Better stand back.”

Megan picked the ax out of the pile on the
floor. She gave it to Finn. “Get down,” she said, “and keep hold of
this.”

“What are you gonna do?”

Megan turned the quarter-sized valve on the
side of the blue blowtorch bottle and felt relief at the hissing
sound that greeted her. She squeezed the handles of the starter
together. It sparked, and she touched the starter’s round head to
the valve’s nozzle and squeezed again.

A ragged, yellow flame ignited. Megan
dropped the starter and turned the blowtorch dial until the flame
shortened and dimmed to a piercing blue intensity.

“I keep my word,” Megan whispered to Finn.
“We’re going out.”

She knelt beside her car. Beside
Ben’s
car. The car she drove for a year after she buried
him. The Chrysler with the pushbutton shift that he loved so
much.

She crouched forward, leaning behind the
car’s back tire. “Get down,” she said again, and Finn knelt inside
the freezer.

Megan reached to set the blowtorch nozzle
under the car. She snugged the glowing tip of blue flame against
the gas tank. Then she stood and jumped into the freezer chest.

“Jesus,” was all Finn said as Megan wrapped
her arms around him and switched the flashlight off. He dropped to
the bottom of the chest, pulling its top down and hearing it latch
above them.

The only other thing they heard after that
was the soft
foomph!

They were spinning in the dark.

The
Box

Bombardier

Even barely conscious, she could tell that
whatever she was in was moving, and that it was doing it fast. She
had a blinking-eye moment, a flash of suddenly-awake awareness that
made her open her eyes abruptly, squint and look around groggily,
and think for a disconcerting moment,
flying
.

The sounds, the gentle wavering motion, the
sheer sense of hurtling along. The seat she was in was narrow and
tipped back, the ceiling above her close and dotted with lights and
buttons she didn’t recognize, a porthole window covered beside and
above her. Megan was waking up on a plane.

She opened her eyes more fully and struggled
to sit upright but couldn’t. She couldn’t get her hands under her,
couldn’t even get her wrists apart, and her head felt heavy and her
mind unsteady. She stopped trying to reposition herself and settled
for twisting her neck so she could see somewhere, anywhere that
might bring her more information.

Another set of seats was on the far wall.
There were four of them on that side, facing each other and
separated by a table trimmed in expensive wood. Megan could see
clouds through a window above the table. A bundled shape was in one
of the seats, a vaguely body-sized lump that she was certain would
be Finn Garber.

She wanted to whisper his name, to call out
softly and get him to turn around to her, but her mouth couldn’t
form the words. Her lips felt numb, and her tongue was thick and
heavy. She clenched and then opened one hand, feeling it tingle,
and she arched her feet in her shoes. Numb as well.

She worked to sit again, trying to find some
spot on her body that felt controlled and not drugged. But she sank
back at the voice of a man coming up the aisle behind her.

“We’ll be there shortly.”

Megan heard steps. She closed her eyes and
pressed herself more deeply into the seat. She held her breath as
the man stopped and then crouched next to her.

“I know you’re awake.” It was Waldoch.

Megan didn’t respond. She heard him sigh
heavily, and she felt him lean toward her. “You didn’t think I
would just go along with you and your grand plan, did you?” he
asked. “You imagined some great way of resolving a problem you no
doubt perceived. But did you think I would sit back and let you do
whatever you wished? Say whatever you wanted? Threaten however you
saw fit?” He came in closer, his voice a whisper near her ear.

“Did you think I would let you take away the
things I had, without expecting you to pay a price for doing it?
Especially after what you’ve done to me now?”

Megan opened her eyes, gasping when she saw
the sight of Waldoch’s face. She managed to straighten this time.
She forced herself upright and drew away from him at the same time.
Pushing to be as far from him as possible, she pressed her body
against the cabin wall of the airplane. It was cold against her
shoulder, and it vibrated with the thrum of engines.

“Where are we?” she asked, the words
slurred. “Where are we going?”

Waldoch stood, watching her look around in
confusion. “To a place no one will be able to find you,” he said.
“And that’s the beauty of it – you disappeared once before, so
it won’t be a surprise to anyone this time. Which means they won’t
even
try
to look for you.”

The feel of the wall made Megan’s head hum.
She blinked at the pain in it as she sorted through what Waldoch
had said. She reached awkwardly to her covered window, finally
noticed the bindings on her wrists then, and managed to clutch at
the window’s shade. She started to push it up, lost hold for a
moment, then raised it fully.

Megan turned to the window. She looked out
and down. The only thing she saw was the color of the sea.

Flight

Hanley hated flying. He always had. When he
joined the Bureau and was heading to an overseas posting, he was
pushed by his then-thriving desire to be away from the person he
once was, so he justified what he knew would be extensive time in a
plane with the realization that he wouldn’t be heading back to the
States for anything anytime soon. Which was largely true till
now.

It was his second crossing in a few days,
but the purpose was more urgent. When Hanley arrived at Megan
Davis’s home, three protective agents in tow and ready for posting,
he saw destruction, a body, and blood, but there was little else in
the way of explanation.

The body was inside the house. The driver’s
license on it was for a Russell Haas, and it only took a phone call
to confirm that Haas worked for Waldoch. He was the latest in a
series of ex-con security men Waldoch hired over the years, but
Haas’s job was done. He’d taken a bullet above the eye, from a gun
no one could find.

The pool around Haas’s facedown position was
large, round, and centered in the middle of the living room.
Working out a quick angle of entry and flight path, Hanley figured
that the security man was shot by someone standing just behind the
house’s front door. A friendly to Megan, presumably, given Haas’s
fate, but one who also had his own troubles.

They found more blood there – a spatter
on the wall, a clear handprint on a table, and a drip pattern from
someone who’d stood still for a few minutes, was worked around
after that, and fled toward the attic. The door leading there was
shattered.

They’d pieced it together as best they
could. The blood source went up the stairs, with followers who
broke the door down and left two red footprint sets – one
going all the way up and the other reaching halfway before turning
and heading back down and out through the front door.