I REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS before Lucy. I was lying on my side on a carpeted floor, trussed like a Christmas goose. My eyes refused to focus. The room was dim. I was seeing double.
Another concussion? Fuckin’ things were going to be the death of me yet.
I lay there for several minutes, trying to get my head right, feeling my fingers, hands, legs. And listening, which told me a television was on. I finally identified the voice of Sergeant Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes when he said, “I know nuthink, nuthink.”
Sonofabitch. Maybe I’d been knocked back to 1968.
More inane talk, then canned laughter.
I tried to sit up, didn’t make it. My hands were held behind my back, ankles bound. I felt weak as a kitten.
I waited a few minutes, then tried again.
Finally, I made it, got into a sitting position with my back against a bed, knees bent, feet flat on the floor. The curtains were pulled but light spilled around the edges. I turned my head. Green glowing digits of a clock on a night table beside me showed 4:42.
All I could see were curtains, a table and chair, a door eight feet to my left. Everything was shifted a little, side to side. I closed one eye and one of the images disappeared, which helped. I couldn’t see or hear Lucy or Harper, or anyone else, but most of the room was behind me, out of sight. A faint sound of traffic on the highway outside came though the walls, a few sporadic cars passing by. The only sound in the room was Schultz and Hogan. Then Colonel Klink.
Maybe I was in hell.
I struggled to my feet, almost fell over, then Harper said, “Oh, thank God.”
A young man’s voice said, “Take it easy, dude. Take it the fuck easy or I’ll put you down again.”
I squinted into the gloom. The flickering light of the television illuminated a guy lying on the bed closest to me. Hard to tell his age, but he looked young. Too young for what was taking place, not that I knew, yet, what that was. Harper was on the other bed, closer to the bathroom. Lucy was beside her. Both were on their backs, hands tied in front of them. Lucy’s right ankle was held to Harper’s left with duct tape, which would make it all but impossible for them to run or fight. Harper was awake. Lucy wasn’t.
The kid on the bed watched me but didn’t get up. He had a black device of some kind in one hand, a gun in the other with a silencer on the end.
“Gun,” he said, wagging the automatic. “And Taser. I prefer the Taser. No blood, no noise. But I’ll use the gun if you make me, so sit down.”
I did a foot shuffle to move backward then collapsed onto a chair four feet from the outside door.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Joe Blow. What’s it to you?”
Weird kid.
“That mean I can call you Blow?” I said.
He stared at me, eyes bright. “Do that and I’ll put a bullet in your knee and fuck the blood. That’d hurt. I doubt that anyone would hear it, but you might yell so … Taser first, then bullet.”
I believed him. His voice was lifeless, like he was dead inside. I decided to keep still, not give him any trouble, but I finally recognized him as the redheaded kid I’d seen at the Red Lion, the idiot with the too-loud stereo in his car. He still looked nineteen years old, no more than twenty.
“Someone hit me. Was it you?”
“My uncle. He was first in the door, tagged you with a Taser and a billy club—one, two. I was right behind him. I punched one of the bitches, got the other one with a Taser. Easy. Whole thing took like four seconds.”
“Other than your name, Joe, who are you?”
For a moment he didn’t answer, then he grinned and sat up straighter. “Vicki Cannon. Cathy Jantz.”
The guy was nuts. In fact, my head wasn’t right, so the names didn’t mean anything to me. Yet.
“Harper,” I called softly to her.
“What?” She sounded terrified.
“Are you okay?”
“Pretty much. He Tasered me, but I’m not hurt now.”
“How’s Lucy?”
“She … she’s breathing. He hit her when they came in, then he hit her again, later.”
I looked at the guy. He shrugged. “She got loud. She’s got a big mouth so I decked her. But screw her, it’s the other one we want.”
We. His uncle—at least that’s what he called the other guy, who wasn’t there at the moment. Right now, it was one-on-one, except that I hardly counted as one. I might not count as a half, even if my arms and legs were free and the kid didn’t have a gun.
But they wanted Harper, whoever they were. Which made sense. This was still about the attorney general, not about Lucy or me.
“Let the other girl go,” I said.
The guy laughed. “Shut up or get Tasered.” He gave me that flat stare and a faint eerie smile. “I like Taserin’. It’s a blast and a half, dude. Give me a reason.”
So I shut up.
The digital clock read 5:20.
Vicki Cannon. Cathy Jantz. The missing teenage girls who’d been found dead in a basement in Reno. Hung.
Shit.
The television played on.
5:35. Lucy woke up.
“Mort?” Her voice was weak.
“I’m here, honey.”
“Where?”
“Over here by the door.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m … fine. Not too bad. How are you?”
“My head hurts.”
Joe sniggered. “You two shut up.”
Lucy struggled to sit up with her back against the wall. With their ankles taped together, Harper had to sit up too. Lucy looked at Joe. “Who’re you?”
“I’m the guy with the gun who’s gonna put a bullet in this guy’s kneecap if you don’t shut up, bitch.”
She shut up, but kept her eyes on me. They looked big and luminous in the dim room. And very angry. She knows when to zip it and when to pick her battles, but she doesn’t take shit off anyone for a minute longer than she has to.
6:45.
7:52. I still had a headache, but I was no longer seeing double.
At 8:35 someone knocked on the door, three raps, one, three. The door opened and Max came in. He had a key, so 3-1-3 meant don’t shoot me.
It had to be Max, but he’d changed. No longer bald, he wore a medium-length dark brown wig, glasses with wire rims, and he’d lost the beard, probably knew there would be an APB out on him. But the meaty shoulders and neck were the same, still solid muscle.
He had a pizza box in one hand. Within seconds the smell of cheese and pepperoni filled the room.
“Finally,” Joe said, getting off the bed. “What the hell, Uncle Jake. Where’ve you been?”
Jake.
Jake’s eyes whipped snakelike toward the kid. “I told you not to use my name. Ever.”
“Like, what’s it matter? It’s not like they’re gonna get a chance to tell anyone.”
“It’s a principle. A doctrine. We do it because we do it. You need to do what I tell you, bud.”
The kid shrugged, then said, “Sure, okay.”
“You tell ’em your name?”
“I told this guy I was Joe Blow.”
Jake hesitated, then said. “Okay. Keep it that way.”
So Joe wasn’t Joe. Except he was, for now.
Jake, no longer Max, turned to me. “Mortimer Angel.” He grinned. “That was a hell of a surprise, you gettin’ into this deal.”
I didn’t answer.
“You’re famous for finding famous people who end up dead,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”
Funny guy, except he didn’t smile.
They opened the pizza box and each grabbed a slice. “How about giving us some of that?” I said.
Jake stared at me. “No point, man. Now shut up.”
Like uncle, like nephew.
They took us out to two vehicles at 10:15 that night, the kid’s Volvo and a white Suburban. Lucy’s and Harper’s hands were flex-cuffed behind their backs. I had a chain around my waist, wrists flex-tied to the chain at my hips. The three of us had our feet hobbled by lengths of nylon cord ten or twelve inches long; we could only shuffle out to the cars. Duct tape covered our mouths.
“Struggle, fight, try to run, or make any sound at all,” Jake said to me, “and I’ll bust you up so bad you’ll wish you were dead, man. I’ll break both your legs and both arms. I don’t see that I’ll have any use for you.” He gave me a cold look. “Better yet, how about I bust up that other girl if you get wild ideas? Not Harper, though. She and I have got us some talking to do first.”
I didn’t have any way to fight or run so I went quietly as I was put in the front passenger seat of the Volvo. Jake strapped me in using the seat belt, flex-tied my ankles to the seat supports in the floor. He stripped off the duct tape, which might have made a sharp-eyed highway patrol officer suspicious. Once we were on the road I could yell or spout obscenities, but … probably not a good idea.
Lucy and Harper were strapped into the Suburban, Lucy in back, Harper in the passenger seat up front. Jake removed their duct tape before we left the motel parking lot, but I heard him tell them what would happen to me if they screamed for help. If you need to control someone, don’t threaten them, threaten someone they love.
Another doctrine, if you were a murdering sociopath.
“You ready?” Jake’s voice came over a handheld two-way radio on the console between the front seats.
“We’re good,” Joe said.
“Get going. Pay attention to the speed limit. I don’t want to have to kill some cop.”
We left Tonopah at 10:20, Joe’s Volvo in the lead, the Suburban following. We were eight miles out of town when Dipshit Joe hit the stereo and the nightmare thud of bass rattled the windows and set up a pounding in my head that almost loosened my eyeballs. The lyrics were putrid—he’d put on a Jo-X rap CD, cranked up to 120 decibels.
Jonnie-X, Jonnie Xenon, whom I’d last seen hanging in the rafters of a garage with a bullet hole in his forehead, another one in his chest—an unattached garage at a house rented by two girls, Danya and Shanna. Danya Fuller was the daughter of RPD Detective Fairchild, and Shanna was Danya’s … bride. Or she was Fairchild’s daughter-in-law. That was a year ago and I still didn’t know how to define their relationship so the PC police wouldn’t drag me away.
“Where to?” I asked Joe in a five-second gap between the thundering rap crap.
“Reno. Now shut up.”
We did the speed limit the whole way and didn’t pass through towns bigger than Hawthorne or Fallon until we reached the outskirts of Sparks on I-80. We went through Sparks and into Reno, the stereo off, silent, not drawing attention to the car at 2:20 in the morning. My head was still throbbing from all the pounding it had taken. Jo-X’s gangsta rap was worse than Jake’s Taser or billy club. My brain felt like mush. I would be partly deaf for two hours.
We got off I-80 at Wells Avenue, then headed south, turned west on Vassar Street.
“Pull over,” Jake’s voice came over the two-way. “Get some duct tape on him.”
Joe pulled over, ripped off six inches of duct tape and stuck it over my mouth. The Suburban took the lead. We went across Virginia Street and into the older tree-shaded neighborhoods west of Arlington Avenue. As we crossed Arlington, we passed within a quarter mile of Ma Clary’s house, south of California Avenue.
Two and a half blocks west on Monroe, the Suburban pulled into the driveway of a two-story house, not a light on in the place. A FOR SALE sign was on the lawn in front. Jake stopped the Suburban by a side door to the house and Joe pulled in behind him.
We sat in the dark and quiet until Jake walked back to us, opened the passenger door, cut the straps holding my feet, and hauled me out. He had a heavy canvas bag in one hand. He left Joe to watch Lucy and Harper. As he walked me to the door, I thought about trying to kick him to death since he had freed my feet—small chance of succeeding and I didn’t see how that would help Lucy and Harper, still with Joe. Jake opened the side door with a key and pushed me into the house.
We went through a laundry room and into a kitchen. It had no countertops, no sink or cabinets, no plumbing or wiring. The floor had been torn out all the way down to the floor joists. Strips of plywood were laid over the joists as a pathway. In another room, probably the dining room, I saw furniture draped in ghostly pale sheets.
“Place is for sale,” Jake said. “Seller ran out of money for the kitchen remodel two weeks ago, so the contractor’s on hold. When the cabinets were torn out, rot was found in the subflooring, joists, and an outside bearing wall. The price of the remodel jumped by thirty-five grand. I don’t expect buyers to come through anytime soon. The seller and his wife could show up, in which case they’re gonna have a real bad day, same as you.”
He pushed me through an arch, down a dark hallway, opened a door, hit a light switch. We went down a flight of bare wooden stairs into a musty basement. The floor was forest green Berber. A billiard table stood in the middle of the room, cue sticks in a wooden holder on a wall, flat-screen TV, a recliner, two leather couches, small bookshelf loaded with Blu-ray discs and paperbacks. A man cave. To the left of the stairs a door was open to a half bath—toilet and sink.
When we reached the bottom, Jake stripped the duct tape off my mouth. “Yell if you want,” he said. “No one’ll hear you, but I’d deck you anyway, because—”
“It’s a principle,” I finished the thought for him.
“You pay attention. Interesting, not that it’ll matter.”
The basement was divided into two rooms. Jake led me to a door to the right of the stairs. It swung inward. He pushed me inside and flipped a switch revealing an oblong room somewhat larger than the man cave. It had concrete walls and floors, heavy wooden beams overhead, a rusty drain in the floor by a good-sized hot water heater, a big workbench with tools on a pegboard on the wall behind it. It was set up as a wood shop, with an expensive Jet floor model drill press, Jet band saw, table saw, sander, jig saw, shop vac, dowels standing in a bin, wood on racks on the walls. A battery-powered clock on a wall showed 2:50.
Jake set the bag on the floor. “I read about you,” he said. “Internet search. Among other things, you’re some kind of a hotshot escape artist. This time you’re not going anywhere, guaranteed.”
He shoved me and I stumbled, hands still held at my sides to the chain around my waist. “Lay on the floor, facedown,” he said. “Feet straight out.”
I did, and he tied my feet with a length of nylon cord, looping it around my ankles in figure eights, tying the ends in a square knot. Then he rolled me over, lifted me to my feet like I was a bale of hay. Strong goddamn guy.
He stood me against a concrete wall fifteen feet from the workbench. Eyebolts had been put in the walls around the room, purpose unknown, but they had obviously been there for years. From his bag he removed a quarter-inch-thick steel cable, loops in both ends, a little over three feet long, and a heavy-duty padlock. He showed it to me, held it at both ends and gave it an experimental pull, as if it were a garrote. Thick one.
“Seven-thousand-pound breaking strength,” he said. “That oughta hold you.”
He looped the cable twice around my neck, held the end loops together, and padlocked them both to a heavy eyehook in the wall, five and a half feet off the floor. He stood back and checked his work. The cable had almost no slack in it.
“Good deal,” he said. “I had a guy in a hardware store in Tonopah make that up for me. That’s what took me a while to get back with the pizza, that and picking up a few other things. Figured you for a seventeen-inch neck, stud. You’re probably gonna die right where you are now. The only way you’re getting out of that hook-up is by removing your head.”
I’d never felt so helpless. My hands were still held to the chain around my waist. Whatever Jake had in mind, I wasn’t going to be able to help Lucy or Harper. At all. I was now an observer, irrelevant, useless.
Jake went out the door. I heard him go up the stairs to the first floor. For the moment, I was alone. I struggled a little, a hopeless gesture, trying to loosen the cable or pull the eyehook out of the wall using my neck. There wasn’t the slightest give in any of it. Even if my hands were free, I couldn’t do anything about the cable around my neck.
So I waited, looking around the room. Nothing was within reach. He’d attached me to a bare concrete wall.
Two minutes later he returned with Harper, guiding her by the flex-cuff holding her hands behind her back. Joe pushed Lucy ahead of him. She and Harper were wearing what they’d had on at the Stargazer Motel, which wasn’t much. Both had duct tape over their mouths, but the rope that had held their ankles had been removed so they could walk. When Lucy saw me and how I’d been cabled to the wall, her eyes got wide with dismay.
“Sit ’em down against the wall over there,” Jake said. He removed his wig, tossed it on the workbench. His head was bald, reflecting the fluorescent lighting. “I’ve got work to do, call it home improvement. Unless,” he said, sinking into a crouch in front of Harper once she was on the floor with her back against a wall twenty feet from me, “you want to tell me where it is, avoid all this.” He stripped the duct tape off her mouth, then did the same for Lucy, two feet to Harper’s left.
“Where—” Harper coughed, tried again. “Where what is?” She held her legs straight out in front of her, together, trying to keep her short skirt from showing too much. Her hands were still behind her back, as were Lucy’s.
“We can play that game for a while if you want, girl,” Jake said mildly, “but if you don’t tell me where it is, this is gonna turn into a pretty rough deal.”
“Where what is?”
He shook his head, stood up.
Harper and Lucy looked at me with frightened eyes. I wanted to signal that we would get out of this, but I didn’t have it in me. Lucy closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall, but there was something tough about the set of her mouth. Her teeth were working on her lips. She was a fighter and her feet weren’t tied. If we had any hope down here, Lucy was it.
Jake went through the billiard room and up the stairs. He came back with a chair that might have come from the dining room, plopped it down in the middle of the room beneath a wooden beam. He got a new eyebolt out of the canvas bag, and a cordless drill and a set of drill bits. The eyebolt was shiny steel, three-eighths of an inch thick with a wood screw formed in one end. He compared drill bits to the eyehook screw, selected one, then got up on the chair and sunk a vertical hole in the beam. He screwed in the eyebolt, then stuck a screwdriver through the eye and used it to crank the bolt deep into the beam.
“Go get those stools,” he said to Joe. “They’re in back of the Suburban.” He looked at Lucy and Harper. “These two babes aren’t goin’ anywhere.”
Joe left, footsteps clumping up the stairs, then he was gone. Jake stood in front of Harper. “Where is it, girl?”
“I don’t know what ‘it’ is.” Her voice rose in pitch at the end, like a cry for help.
Jake shook his head again. He turned to me. “Guess you found what I put on your truck’s radiator, huh?”
I stared at him for a moment. “Saw something when I lifted the hood to check the oil, halfway between Ely and Elko. I showed it to the guy at the gas station. He didn’t know what it was, but he pulled it off. What was it?” No sense telling Jake I had a good idea what it was.
“Shaped charge. That’s an explosive that cuts in one direction. It’d tear a fair-sized chunk out of that radiator. Which reminds me.” He took something like a pager off his belt and dropped it on the workbench. “Don’t need this anymore. Not right now anyway. Been carrying it around so long I forgot I had it on me.”
“Remote detonator?” I asked.
“You got it. Has a range of two miles, line of sight.”
I appeared to think about that, as if I didn’t already know. “Is that how you disabled Harper’s car?”
“That’s affirmative, dude.”
“Where do you buy something like that?”
He smiled. “You don’t. It helps if your brother is an ex-SEAL, demolition expert. He’ll be here in a few hours. You can meet him. If you think I’m tough, wait’ll you meet Kyle. What he might do is put a charge around your neck, see if it’ll take your head entirely off. My guess is it won’t. There’s a lot of strings and gristle in a neck. But you never know until you try. I’ll have to get him to hold off on that until we’re about done here. Fact is, we’re not going to get this party really rockin’ until he gets here. You don’t want that to happen. It’d be a lot better if you told me where it is now.” He yawned, then glanced at a watch on his wrist. “Damn, stud, I’ve been up thirty-six hours. I could use a little sack time before Kyle gets here.”
I didn’t say anything.
Joe returned, carrying two three-legged stools made of cheap pine, twenty inches tall with round tops.
“Got some interesting history here,” Jake said, taking one of the stools from Joe. “These are the stools I used on those two high school girls.”
Harper made a gagging sound. She looked away, into a corner of the room. Lucy didn’t.
Jake stared at the girls. “You first,” he said to Harper. He set a stool under the eyehook he’d sunk into the beam. He took Harper by an arm and hauled her up, pulled her toward the stool, grabbed her under the arms and lifted her like a sack of dog food, no problem, no hesitation, and stood her up on the stool. Lifted a hundred twelve pounds in a modified military press as if she weighed ten pounds.
He stood a few feet from her. “That’s a hell of a short skirt, girl. Kinda slutty, but I like it. Now don’t move.” He took a length of half-inch nylon rope out of the canvas bag, measured off about thirty feet, cut it, sealed the ends with a butane lighter. After it cooled, he tied a knot in one end. “This here’s a bowline,” he said, showing it to Harper. “In case you’re interested. Anytime you want me to stop, all you have to do is tell me where it is.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I promise. I really really don’t.”
He shrugged. “Have it your way, girlie. So here we go—bowline’s got a small loop, pass the other end through that loop, pull the rope through until you’ve got a bigger loop, which”—he stood on the chair next to Harper—“goes around your neck like this, tight enough but not too snug because I’m a nice guy, then the free end goes up through the eyehook in the beam, like this.” He stepped off the chair. “Then it’s tied to an eyehook in the wall behind you, leaving a little slack, not enough to matter, not enough that your feet would reach the floor if you fall off that stool, but it’d jerk the hell out of your neck if you do. And, of course, you’d strangle yourself, so you oughta stand still.”
When he was finished, Harper was on the stool with a noose around her neck. The stool looked rickety, just three slender pine legs keeping her alive.
I glanced at Lucy. Her eyes had narrowed, taking in Harper, the rope, the stool. I could tell that her brain was working, hard. Mine was too, but I wasn’t coming up with anything useful. All I could do was hope that Jake would die suddenly of a heart attack or an aneurysm.
He looked up at Harper. “Anytime you want to end this, you know what to do.”
“But I don’t,” she wailed.
Jake shrugged. “We’ll see.” He got up on the chair and installed another eyehook in the beam, six feet from the one he’d put in for Harper.
He looked down at Lucy, thinking. He looked around the room then back up at Harper. “That’s an idea,” he said to himself.
He got a pair of scissors off the pegboard above the workbench, then cut Harper’s tank top off, slicing up the front from bottom to top, then across her shoulders. He pulled it off her, not bothering to give her a second look. Joe, however, ogled her breasts until Jake said, “Get that bucket over there and fill it with water. There’s a bathroom in the other room.”
Joe grabbed the bucket and went out the door. Harper gave me a despairing look.
Jake slung Harper’s ruined tank top over his shoulder, then grabbed Lucy by the back of her neck and lifted her off the floor. She made a startled squawk and got her feet under her. Jake walked her over to the drain in the floor, shoved her down, faceup, hands still behind her back, and straddled her, forcing her down with his weight.
I struggled against the neck cable but got nowhere. If looks could kill, he would’ve gone up in a puff of sulfur.
“Turn around, Harper,” he said. “Do it now. You need to see this. Call it motivation.”
Harper shuffled around on the stool. She made a tiny cry of horror when she saw Lucy on her back, Jake on top of her.
Joe came in with the bucket of water. Jake told him to stand by Lucy’s head. Jake covered Lucy’s face with the top he’d cut off Harper. “Anyone here ever see someone waterboarded?” he asked. “No? No one’s got anything to say? No one wants to tell me where it is?” He looked up at Joe. “Pour water on her face. Not too much, just enough to soak the material real good.”
“Stop,” I yelled.
Jake turned. “Where is it?”
“It’s … I’ve got it.”
He stared at me, shook his head. “Don’t think so, stud. Right about now you’d lie to God. But if you’ve got it, you know what it is. So what is it?”
I couldn’t answer that.
Jake turned away from me. “Do it,” he said to Joe.
Joe tipped the bucket and poured water on the ruined tank top covering Lucy’s face.
Lucy gasped, then choked as she inhaled water. She arched her back and tried to buck Jake off, but he was too heavy. He shoved her shoulders into the concrete floor.
“More,” he said to Joe.
“Omigod, stop!” Harper screamed.
Jake took Harper’s top off Lucy’s face. She took big wet gulps of air, coughing, sputtering. “Got something to say, girlie?” Jake asked Harper. “If you tell me you know where it is and I find out you don’t, I will rearrange your face with a blowtorch, and Lucy’s, and this big guy’s. So what’ll it be, sugar tits?”
“I … I don’t know what it is,” she sobbed.
“So be it.” He arranged the material over Lucy’s face again, then nodded to Joe. “Do it.”
Water splashed. Lucy bucked, choked, drummed her heels against the floor. Joe eased up on the water. “Keep going,” Jake said, and I wanted to kill him, I had to kill him. I bit the inside of my mouth and tasted blood, willing him to die, to spontaneously combust.
“Okay, stop,” Jake said. He took the wet top off Lucy’s face. She gagged, dragged in a little air, coughed, gagged some more, then cried, “Mooooort,” in a little girl’s voice. She sounded five years old.
My heart broke. My eyes bulged with white-hot rage. I lunged against the cable. I spit blood.
“Mooort, help … h-h-h-help. I-I can’t—” She let out a soul-rending keening wail of misery, as if all the innocence were leaving her mind and body.
I felt a part of myself die inside.
Jake looked up at Harper. “What say you, girlie?”
She was crying, tears flooding her face. “You are going to burn in hell. You are gonna—” She couldn’t finish.
Jake shrugged. “One more time,” he said to Joe. “See if we can’t loosen something up here.”
“No, no, no, no, please!” Lucy wailed, tearing my heart apart. Then more water, more choking, gagging. I couldn’t watch, couldn’t listen. I sagged against the cable, felt it bite into my neck.
“Enough,” Jake said after almost a minute, removing the material from Lucy’s face. He stood up.
Lucy gagged. Her chest rose and fell, hitching as she tried to breathe, coughed, retched, spit water, finally got a little air. She lay on her side, breath coming in strangled coughs and gasps.
Jake looked down at her. Then he strode over to me. “How long was that? Total of two or three minutes? How about we do it on and off for half an hour? How about two hours, stud? Two hours and she’d never again be the girl you once knew. She wouldn’t know her own name. I’ll give you a while to think that over. You too,” he said to Harper.
Lucy was still curled on her side, coughing. She looked like a rag doll, hair drenched, eyes closed.
Jake left her like that. He set the second stool under the eyehook he’d put in the beam six feet from Harper. He gave Lucy a few minutes to recover, then got her to her feet and lifted her onto the stool. He got a noose around her neck, up through the eyehook, then over to a second hook in the wall, tied it off.
He turned to me. “Seriously, stud, if you know where it is, now would be a real good time to speak up. If I don’t get it, all of you are gonna die. Badly.”
All I wanted to do was kill him, but I said, “It? What the hell is it? The problem is, none of us knows anything. We might, though, if we had some idea of what the hell you’re looking for.”
A moment of silence. Then: “The recording, man.”
“What recording?”
He stared at me. “If you don’t know, you’re not worth spit. But you get to watch. Although,” he said, giving me a closer look, “one of these gals might be willing to tell me where it is if they don’t want to watch me put out your lights. One never knows which key will fit the lock.”
“You murdered those two teenage girls a week ago,” I said.
“So? I’ve done worse.”
His cell phone rang. He answered, said, “What’s up?” He looked at me. “Yeah, got him hooked up to the wall the way you said. The girls got ropes around their necks. We’re cool. What time you gonna get in?” He listened, then said, “See you then,” and ended the call.
He stood in front of Harper and Lucy. “If either of you makes trouble, Joe has permission to kick Lucy’s stool out from under her. You two might want to think about that.” He glanced at Joe. “Jesus, kid, lose the gun. You don’t need it now. Put it on the workbench over there.”
I could tell Joe didn’t want to do that. He liked having the automatic in his belt, especially with the silencer on the barrel, which probably made him feel like a bad dude, but he did as he was told. Jake went out the door. A minute later the toilet flushed in the other room. He went up the stairs. For a while I didn’t hear him. Joe strolled through the gap between Lucy and Harper. With a foot, he tested a leg of Harper’s stool.
“This thing’s pretty old,” he said. “Kind of unstable.”
“Speaking of unstable,” Lucy said. Her voice still had a wet sound. It didn’t sound like her. Her tank top was wet, partly see-through.
I warned her with my eyes. She looked at me for a few seconds, then gave Joe a diamond-hard stare. Still tough, but I didn’t see any way out of this.
Jake returned. He had something like an axe or a rock hammer in his hand. He showed it to me. “Ever see one of these before, stud?”
I didn’t reply. It was a nasty-looking weapon—a sharp angular spike on one end of a black steel head, cutting edge on the other. Sixteen inches long overall.
“No?” He smiled. “Browning Black Label tomahawk. They call it Shock ’N Awe. American made. Sitting Bull or one of those guys back then would’ve loved this puppy.
“Kinda cool, huh, calling it a tomahawk?” He touched a finger to the tip of the spike. “Got a needle-sharp point on this end. I used it on that dipshit lawyer, put a hole in his forehead you could stick your thumb in. He went down like I’d dropped him with an elephant gun. Here, check it out.” He rested the spike on top of my head and let the weight of the weapon press the point into my scalp. It hurt. I felt it dig in.
“Stop it,” Lucy said, voice almost back to normal.
Jake turned. “You got something to say, girl?”
“Don’t … don’t do that.”
“You know where that recording is? Guess you didn’t get a chance to say much. Waterboarding’s like that. How about now?”
“I don’t know what it’s a recording of or what it’s on.”
“It might be a DVD, or on a flash drive. That give your memory a boost?”
Lucy stared at him, silent.
Jake strolled over to Harper, tomahawk in hand. “But you know, don’t you, sugar tits? You know what it is and where it is. You’ve got that million bucks in your head and you’re not talking. Not yet, but you will.”
“Money? I … I don’t know anything about anything like that. Really, I don’t.”
“That’d be too bad. I’ll waterboard you next. It’ll be bad, real bad. It won’t kill you, but you’ll wish it did. Think about telling me where that goddamn recording is, not go through all of that.”
“A recording of what? I don’t know anything.”
Jake sighed. “Those two girls made a video, put it on a thumb drive, mailed it to …” He paused, thought about it, then went on. “They wanted five hundred thousand each. Dumb kids, didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. I had them in a basement on stools like you two now, but I had to leave for a while. Joe wasn’t there, but my leaving for a lousy twenty minutes should’ve been okay.
“When I came back, they were both hanging, gone. I should’ve waterboarded them right away, probably could have avoided all this. I figure one of them started fussing and fell. I might’ve had them too close together so the one who fell knocked the stool out from under her girlfriend.” He shrugged. “Live and learn. I put you two far enough apart so that’s not likely to happen, and Joe is gonna watch over you. I’ve got the ropes tied off behind you in a fast-release knot. If you fall before it doesn’t matter anymore, he can pull the knot. Which means you oughta be real nice to him.”
“Nice the way I asked you?” Joe said to Jake. “I mean, look at this one.” He stared at Harper’s breasts. With her hands behind her back, she couldn’t hide herself at all.
Jake shrugged. “I don’t care, as long as you don’t hurt ’em.” He stood back and looked at the two girls. “This would be a lot easier for all of us if you’d cooperate.”
“Are you getting paid for this?” I asked, hoping for more information. Anything that might get us out of this.
“Sure am. Pretty good payday, stud. I’m also returning a favor. Gotta pay stuff back, keep folks happy, but I don’t work for free. Neither does Kyle. It’s bad for business. You gotta set parameters or you get screwed over.”
He yawned again. “Jesus.” He glanced at his watch. “I gotta get some shut-eye. Kyle said he’d be here about nine.” He looked at Joe. “I’ll be upstairs, got that bed in the back room. Watch these girls. Don’t let anything happen to Harper or I’ll skin you alive, boy.” He smiled, knuckled Joe’s head. “Kidding, but I’d kick the living shit out of you. You best pull that knot damn fast if she falls off that stool.”
He glanced at the tomahawk in his hand, then set it on the workbench. From his utility bag he took out a gun in a nylon holster. It looked like a Glock. He left and I heard him stomping up the stairs. Then things got quiet. The hot water heater came on, making a faint hissing sound off to my right. I couldn’t hear anything from outside the house. The time was 3:55 a.m. Kyle would be here in five hours.
“I’m sorry,” Harper said, looking over at me, then to her right, at Lucy.
“Not your fault,” I replied.
“All of you shut the hell up,” Joe said. He roamed the room, bored. He picked up the scissors and looked at Lucy, ambled over to her.
“This chick’s got fine tits, kinda small though. Let’s have a look at yours.”
He cut her top from waist to neck, same way Jake had cut Harper’s. Her tank top fell open to either side.
“Nice,” he said, checking her out. He cut through the shoulders and stripped it off, then glanced over at me as he tossed the scissors and her top on the workbench. “Guess you were doin’ all right for yourself, stud.”
I didn’t respond to that.
Joe looked at Lucy. “What are you, like eighteen?” He nodded toward me. “What’re you doin’ with that old guy? Is he like your dad or something?”
“Or something,” she said. “Hey, listen. I have to pee.”
Joe shrugged. “Yeah? Then go.”
“Up here? Like this? That’s stupid. I mean, why don’t you pull it out and pee on the floor?”
He grinned. “Not with you watching, bitch.”
“There’s a bathroom in that other room, isn’t there? Let me use that.”
“No way, girl. You’re not gettin’ off that stool. If you gotta go, go. You want, I’ll cut your shorts off so you don’t piss yourself. How ’bout that? Maybe you’d like me to see the rest of you, not just tits. Lot of girls get off on that.”
Lucy took a breath, then stared at the wall in front of her as if to put him out of her mind, but she’d already set the hook.
Joe glanced at the open doorway to the other room. “Be right back. Don’t go away, and don’t fall.” He went out and Lucy went to work the instant he was out the door.
She knocked both sandals off. She stood on her left leg and lifted her right leg up, felt around near her throat for a few seconds and hooked the nylon rope with her big toe. She pushed the front of the noose up toward her mouth. She caught it in her teeth, held it while she lifted her leg behind her neck, got the rope with her toe again and edged the noose partway over the back of her head. She switched legs, got the rope with the big toe of her left foot and lifted the noose entirely off.
Off. It didn’t take forty seconds, start to finish. After having been waterboarded.
Tears fractured my vision.
“Omigod,” Harper breathed. “How—?”
“Shhh,” Lucy hissed as she jumped off the stool. She ran to the workbench and got the scissors, ran over to me, turned her back and put the scissors in my right hand, held out her wrists. No words necessary.
Flex-cuffs are damn tough. It took more effort than I thought it would to cut through the loop holding her right wrist, but I was motivated. The cuff parted three seconds before the toilet flushed in the other room.
The flex-cuff still hung from Lucy’s left wrist, but her hands were free. She darted to the workbench, grabbed the tomahawk and ran to the door. She ducked behind it a few seconds before Joe came through. He stopped when he saw the empty stool. It was the last fraction of a second of startled thought in his short, sorry life, then my true love buried the spike of the tomahawk in the top of his skull, all the way to the hilt.