“Lena…” Valentine whispered, his hand reaching out to her. “Please…”
Lena started coughing as a fine mist filled the room. She had bent the pipe but it held in place—it was the only fucking thing Hank had ever replaced in this falling-down piece of shit house. She screamed in fury, kicking at the pipe until her foot was so badly bruised she could hardly lift it.
“Help!” she tried again, knowing even as she yelled that no one was coming. Bart had shot the gun twice and no one had bothered to ride to their rescue. This was a working-class neighborhood. No one was home in the middle of a Friday morning; at least no one who would care.
The gun. Lena saw it sitting on the table against the wall. She lunged for it, her arm nearly popping out of the socket. She couldn’t reach the table. Lena rolled onto her back and kicked out her feet, trying to loop them around the leg of the table so that she could pull it over. She grazed the metal with the toe of her shoe, then stopped as she heard a bottle break. A plume of white smoke erupted over the table. The liquid dripped to the floor, sizzling like bacon as it ate through the linoleum. What was she thinking? She’d just released more chemicals into the air. And what would Lena do if she managed to get the gun? She couldn’t shoot a weapon in here. Fumes were already filling the air. A spark from a gun could blow up the whole house.
“No-no-no,” she panted, sitting up, trying to make herself think. “Oh, God, please.” She jerked the cuff one more time and screamed in pain. Her wrist was bruised and bleeding. It hurt so bad that maybe it was broken. “No,” she whispered, coughing around the word. Her lungs shook in her chest. She felt as if she’d inhaled cotton. Lena coughed to clear them, but nothing would work. She reached up and turned on the faucet, cupping her hand underneath and bringing the water to her lips, her eyes.
So many years she had sat in this house praying to God that she wouldn’t die here, that she could somehow get out of this awful town and make something of herself, yet here she was, trapped in Hank’s house, living out her worst nightmare.
Lena choked back a sob. Jeffrey would figure this out. He wouldn’t let a fucking dentist autopsy his wife. He’d get somebody from the state to look at the bodies. They’d see Valentine’s broken skull. Maybe there would be enough of Lena left for them to see the bruises on the bottom of her foot, the bloody pulp of her wrist.
Her wrist.
Lena saw it then, saw the way out.
She reached for Clint, trying to grab the leg of his pants, his shoe, anything she could hold on to. Her fingers weren’t even close. She lay flat on her stomach, her arm stretched over her head as far as it would go, and kicked out her legs, trying to use her feet to pull Clint’s body toward her. He was a heavy man, but she managed to clamp one of his feet between her own, inching him over until she was able to loop her shoe through the chain that connected his wallet to his belt. She tightened her abs, screaming from exertion as his body came closer. Lena sat up, reaching for him, finally able to grab the leg of his pants and drag him close enough to get to the knife on his belt.
Lena looked at Valentine. He was staring at her, fear blazing in his eyes.
She didn’t give herself time to think, taking the knife and hacking it into his wrist. Valentine’s mouth opened, but he didn’t scream. He gave this kind of high-pitched whine that seemed to last forever. Lena tried to close her ears to it, hacking at the skin again, trying to reach the sweet spot where bone gave way to tendon. Her stomach turned as blood squirted into her face, repulsion almost overcoming her. The handcuff around his wrist was so tight that she couldn’t rear back with the knife high enough for fear of dulling the blade on the metal. She stopped, trying to catch her breath, trying not to vomit. On the stove, she could hear gurgling as the liquid started to boil.
“Please…” Valentine whispered. “No, Lord, please…”
She pushed away the remains of Valentine’s broken cell phone, pressed Valentine’s wrist as flat to the floor as it would go, and placed the knife blade against his wrist.
“No,” Valentine begged, his voice rising in register as he saw what she was going to do. “Oh, God! Oh, God! No!”
Lena stood up and pressed the sole of her shoe against the knife, the double-sided blade slicing into the rubber. She leaned her forehead against the counter for balance as she put her full weight onto one leg, crunching the blade into his wrist.
“No!” Valentine screeched, his legs kicking out, animal sounds of pain echoing in the room.
She ground the toe of her shoe into the blade, bouncing her weight until the knife cut all the way through to the floor.
The handcuff jerked up, Valentine’s hand popping off his wrist like a loose tooth. The cuff was so tight that his hand wouldn’t come out. Lena stood, his hand slapping against her leg. She gagged, the smoke thicker up high. Her eyes stung and she couldn’t get her bearings.
The mugs on the stove were white-hot, liquid boiling up. She tried to turn off the knobs but just the stems remained and she couldn’t get them to budge. Smoke filled the room with rolling black clouds. In the distance, Lena could see Sara had managed to sit up. As Lena watched, Sara’s mouth moved, but she made no attempt to stand, no motion to leave the burning house.
Lena stumbled toward her, slamming against the table, knocking the matchbooks onto the floor. She looked down, saw that the red strike pads had all been peeled off, the matches unused. Her arm started throbbing and she realized she had put her hand in broken glass. There was a strange odor, then blinding pain. Acid. She had put her hand in the broken bottle of acid. Her mouth opened, but there was no breath in her lungs to scream as she jerked her hand away from the table.
“Lena…” Valentine called from behind her. “Please…”
Lena moved forward, away from his voice. She felt as if her own skin was dripping off the bones of her hand, but she pushed herself on, made her legs move toward Sara, even though every ounce of sense left in her body was screaming for her to go the other way.
She coughed, gagging from the smoke, the heat of the enclosed room boiling her skin. He had set it all up so perfectly. The kitchen was a mad scientist’s dream and every cop’s nightmare.
Lithium batteries. Iodine. Paint thinner. Lye.
Some of the same ingredients used to make crystal meth were used in the bomb that brought down the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
She had to reach Sara before the house exploded, had to get them both out of here and into the open air.
“Sara!” Lena screamed, lurching down the hallway. She squatted in front of her, grabbing Sara under the arms and trying to pull them both to standing. “Help!” she yelled, her legs cramping as she forced them both up the wall. The smoke was so thick now that Lena couldn’t see. She felt tears running down her cheeks from the stinging chemicals. Something popped in the kitchen, like a champagne cork or a popgun. Lena swung Sara’s arm over her shoulders, dragging her toward the front door. She could see the crack of sunlight coming through where the door hadn’t quite shut.
“Please, Sara,” Lena begged. “Please help me. I can’t lift you.”
Sara’s legs started to move in an awkward walk. Lena pulled her forward, yanked open the door. The sunlight was blinding. She could feel the handcuff and what was still in it banging against the door as she pushed Sara outside.
They both fell in a heap at the foot of the stairs, but Lena did not let herself stay down. She grabbed Sara underneath her arms and walked backward, dragging her across the yard and into the street. They had reached the neighbor’s sidewalk when the air changed. There was something almost like a vacuum sucking all the oxygen toward the house, then a violent pushing out as a blast of hot air shot past them. Lena did not hear the explosion until she was diving to the ground, using her body to cover Sara’s. Then came the heat, an intense, horrible heat that burned her skin.
Lena lay on top of Sara. Her body was out of adrenaline or whatever it was that had made Lena capable of getting them both out of the house.
Somehow, she forced herself to roll to the side, falling onto her back.
In the distance, a siren announced that help was finally on its way. Lena closed her eyes, let herself feel relief, then joy that she had gotten away. She struggled, sitting up, coughing up a spray of blood. Her hand was hurting so badly that she could barely breathe. She tried not to look at it, tried not to see the melted skin where the acid had eaten into her flesh. That was when she noticed the empty handcuff dangling from her wrist. She looked around her, traced their footsteps across the street. Nothing.
Sara tried to sit up but fell back against the lawn. Up the street, Lena saw an Elawah County sheriff’s cruiser take the turn on two wheels.
“What happened?” Sara mumbled, pressing her fingers into her eyes. “Lena, what happened?”
“It’s okay,” Lena told her. “It’s all over.”
“Are you okay?” Sara asked, still a doctor even though she was flat on her back.
The cruiser screeched to a halt in front of them. Lena struggled to stand as Don Cook got out of the car. Her legs wouldn’t work, and her hand felt as if it was on fire.
“What the hell is going on here?” the deputy demanded.
Lena tasted blood in her mouth. Her stomach clenched and she could barely speak. “Fred Bart,” she told Cook. “You need to find Fred Bart.”
Sara had managed to sit up. She put her hand to Lena’s back, told her to take deep breaths. Lena tried to do this but the blood caught in her throat. She coughed, her body tensing from the effort.
The last thing she heard was Sara screaming, “Call an ambulance!”
Then she passed out.
MONDAY
CHAPTER 27
NICK SHELTON HAD NOT BEEN entirely forthcoming when he’d told Jeffrey the Georgia Bureau of Investigation could only step in when the local law enforcement agency asked them to. There was one exception to this rule: when the local law enforcement was so corrupt that there was no other choice but for the state agency to come in and clean house. You didn’t get more corrupt than trying to blow up a cop and a police chief’s wife in a meth lab, and the state agency had swarmed into Elawah County like a pack of angry hornets.
Jeffrey had been halfway between Coastal State Prison and Reese when his cell phone rang. He hadn’t recognized the number, but knew the voice as soon as he picked up.
“I’m okay,” Sara told him, not even bothering with the formalities. Her words had stopped his heart in his chest, because you didn’t say you were okay unless you’d been decidedly un-okay before.
Sara was calling him from the back of an ambulance; the siren in the background competed with her voice. She had laid out everything she could remember, from Valentine pulling the gun to Bart injecting her with something that had knocked her out. By the time she’d finished the story, Jeffrey’s jaw was so tight that he could barely form words. He had been blowing smoke up Ethan Green’s ass while Sara had been in mortal danger. He would never forgive himself for leaving her alone with Valentine. If the man was not already dead, Jeffrey would have found him and done the deed himself.
Two hours later, when he had finally reached the hospital, Sara seemed more concerned about Lena than herself. She was worried about the plastic surgeon being good enough to fix the burn on her hand, scared an infection would set up in her lungs, sure that the pulmonologist didn’t know what he was doing. She’d been almost manic, pacing back and forth as she spouted her concerns until Jeffrey had physically stopped her.
“I’m okay,” she kept telling him, long after he figured out the words were more for her own benefit than his. Even when he drove her back to Grant County, she kept telling him that she was fine. It wasn’t until last night that she’d finally broken down. He’d told her he was returning to Reese to help Nick Shelton interrogate Fred Bart. She hadn’t told him not to go, but this morning, he’d felt like a criminal as he sneaked out of the house before she woke up.
Jeffrey pulled up in front of the Elawah County jail, vowing that this really would be the last time he laid eyes on the place. There was a HAZMAT truck parked in the lot, a couple of government types milling around and drinking coffee. After the explosion at Hank’s house, they had evacuated his neighborhood within half a square mile so they could clean up the toxic waste. The only things left of the sheriff were bits of DNA they’d found in the yard and the man’s severed hand.
Jake Valentine. Jeffrey felt sick every time he thought about the man. Now that Valentine was dead, they’d found out all sorts of interesting things about him. His modest house in town was obviously his idea of slumming. He owned a large cabin at the lake with two power-boats docked outside. His arrest jacket was pretty clean, but his brother’s was another matter. David Valentine had been stabbed to death in a knife fight with a rival skinhead gang, but judging from his rap sheet, he’d been pretty high up in the Brotherhood. Arson, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder.
Valentine must have learned from his brother’s mistakes; he’d kept a low profile. Except for a misdemeanor arrest for public drunkenness back in college, there was nothing on Jake Valentine’s record that would tell you he was a skinhead drug trafficker running millions of dollars’ worth of meth. The missing piece of the puzzle was Myra, his wife. Myra Valentine, nee Fitzpatrick, was the baby sister of Jerry and Carl Fitzpatrick, the leaders of the Brotherhood of the True White Race. Their parents had moved to Elawah after their hometown in New Hampshire had made it clear that they didn’t want the family of a cop killer living in their midst. Myra had liked it in Reese well enough to stay. Jake Valentine had married into a powerful family, and like most powerful families, they had found a way to employ their shiftless in-law.
Nick had sent out a request to the Brotherhood’s New Hampshire compound, asking to interview Myra. The compound had not replied.
Jeffrey had never entirely trusted Jake Valentine, but he’d been so damn hot on putting Ethan in the middle of everything that he’d let Sara and Lena go off alone with the man. Jeffrey didn’t know whether to feel angry or ashamed at his own blindness. He remembered Grover Gibson’s words that day Jeffrey and Valentine had gone to the man’s shack in the woods to tell him that his son was dead.
“You did this to him!” Grover had screamed, fists flying as he jumped the sheriff. “You killed him!”
Valentine had set it up so well, warning Jeffrey ahead of time that Grover blamed him for his dead son’s drug dependency. Jeffrey had actually helped defend the sheriff.
He couldn’t dwell on that now, because it only made him furious. Fred Bart had to be his focus now. The slimy dentist was the only one left to punish, and he seemed intent on fighting it every step of the way. He’d been in his office filling a cavity when Don Cook finally got around to looking for him. Bart insisted it was sheer coincidence that the patient in his chair also happened to be his lawyer. Nick was sure that Jeffrey could help him break the man. Jeffrey didn’t share the state agent’s optimism. Elawah County was built on secrets that went back decades. The town thrived on looking the other way. Jeffrey doubted very seriously anyone was about to change that, especially Fred Bart.
The jail lobby was even more claustrophobic than Jeffrey remembered. Don Cook was probably in the sheriff’s office upstairs, measuring for new furniture. Nick was seated at the man’s desk, thumbing through one of the deputy’s hunting magazines. He glanced up when he saw Jeffrey. “You look like hell, man.”
“Sara’s not too happy about me being here.”
“She’ll get over it,” Nick said, but Jeffrey wasn’t too sure. “I’m real tore up about Bob Burg, man. They picked him up last night.”
Jeffrey felt the same way. He’d assumed Burg was one of the good guys, but the GBI agent had apparently been taking money for years. “Is he saying anything?”
“Not a peep,” Nick answered. “Bob’s not stupid. He knows he’s not going to see daylight for a while, and he’s not about to rat out a damn skinhead.”
“You didn
’t find anything about Hank contacting him?”
“Bob didn’t write down jack, man. Even if he did, we’d need him to testify, and there’s no way he’ll flip. Those Nazi fuckwads are everywhere. Bob’s gonna be sleeping with one eye open for the rest of his life.”
Jeffrey guessed that was some kind of payback.
“How’s Lena doing?”
“Fine,” he answered, glad to be talking about something else. “She’s gonna need therapy for her lungs, but she should be ready to go back home by the middle of next week.” He added, “They moved her to the same hospital as Hank last night.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Better. Still not out of the woods yet. What about Bart—he doing any talking yet?”
“Shit,” Nick mumbled, standing from the desk. “He’s doing nothin’ but talking. That jackass thinks he can squirm his way out of anything. Claims Lena must’ve been high from the chemicals, that she’s remembering it all wrong. His lawyer says Bart will tell us everything he knows about Valentine if the charges are reduced to reckless endangerment.”
Jeffrey laughed for the first time in days. “He really thinks he’s gonna walk away from this?”
“His lawyer indicated he’d be open to probation with time served.”
Jeffrey laughed again. He was suddenly looking forward to seeing Fred Bart.
Nick turned serious. “I want your read on the lawyer. Something’s going on there.”
“All right,” Jeffrey agreed. “You got the goods?”
Nick handed him a folder, then reached under the desk and buzzed the door open. Jeffrey followed him to the back, thinking that even though only a few days had passed, the building had an air of neglect to it. Don Cook wasn’t exactly a leader, and it was going to take someone with a strong personality and a lot of experience to help the town recover from Valentine’s betrayal. Jeffrey gave the man two months before he stepped down, took his retirement, and went fishing for the rest of his life.