He kept asking her what he should do next.
“It can’t be like the others,” he said. “Not like Pierce, not even like the one we fucked up. This time, it’s just a matter of getting the job done. Brought a little something of my dad’s to help me out.”
Total fucking whackjob.
For a while, she wondered, when she was in her more delirious state, whether he was with MetLife or something. Kept talking about her getting insurance. Then she realized she was the insurance. Yeah, that was what he was saying. Like she was a kind of hostage or something. His ace in the hole. When things went south, she was his ticket to safety.
Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe that meant he would keep her alive. But it didn’t mean that Carol Beakman wasn’t very, very frightened.
She wondered what services he might be expecting her to provide beyond hostage. So far, there was nothing to suggest that sexual predator was part of his profile. Not that that was any great comfort.
Stop thinking about that. Think about getting away. Think think think think.
When they’d reached their destination, she’d had the sense of being moved from the van into a building. Being carried over Cory’s shoulder, then being placed on a bed, a cot. Like one of those rollaway beds made of springs, with tubular metal framing. He put her face-down, tied her wrists to the top frame, ankles to the bottom.
Got her a blanket.
“I don’t think it’s worth making a fire,” he said. “And smoke coming out the chimney’s going to attract attention, maybe, you know?”
He gave her a nudge. “You waking up? You’ve been out a long time.”
She said nothing.
“You should be good for a while,” he said.
Again she said nothing. She’d been keeping her eyes closed as she regained consciousness, opening them only to slits to take in her surroundings. Then, if she heard the door open and close, and didn’t hear his breathing, she’d open her eyes wide.
She was in a shack. Some tiny cottage. She believed she was near water. She could smell ocean in the air, hear the squawking of gulls. And Cory had said they were going to Cape Cod. He’d followed someone here, that much she’d figured out. At one point she opened her eyes a millimeter and saw him holding something. But then he turned his back to her, and she lost sight of it.
It had looked like a gun.
Her fear went up a notch.
It was getting darker, and Cory did not want to turn on any lights in the cabin. He had pulled a wooden chair to the window on the far wall. He sat down and stared outside.
“They’re going out,” he said. “Shit. Where the hell are they going?”
In the dim light, Carol slowly began to twist her wrists against the rope that bound them to the top frame. Her fingers had been going numb, and when Cory had been looking the other way, she’d been wiggling them, trying to keep the circulation going. The rope around her ankles was not secured as tautly to the bottom frame, allowing her to inch her body further up the cot. When she had the opportunity, she’d be in position to get her teeth on the rope.
After a period of time—Carol was having trouble tracking the hours, but it was fully dark now—Cory got up from the chair and began to pace the room. “They’ve been gone for fucking ever! Where the hell are they? What if they’ve gone back and I’m sitting here?” He shook his head angrily. “Time to listen in again.”
He went outside. Carol thought she heard the sliding door of a van. Some time later—ten minutes, twenty?—he returned. She heard him muttering, “Nothing, nothing.”
And then he left.
Carol picked away at the ropes with her teeth, but she wasn’t making any headway.
A short while later, the door burst open again. Cory went back to his post by the window.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Here we go.”
Carol heard a car drive past the cabin.
“I bet they went to a movie,” she heard him say. “What else could keep them out that long?”
A pause, then, “Okay, good, good. They’re heading in.”
He stood quickly, took a couple of deep breaths. “This is it,” he said under his breath, before going out of the door and closing it behind him.
Carol didn’t know what “it” was, but she had a pretty good idea it wasn’t going to be anything good.
She inched forward again and resumed working at the rope with her teeth.
FIFTY-FOUR
CAL
AS best I could tell, the entire beach house was surrounded by fire. Something flammable—maybe gas, maybe something else that didn’t smell quite as strong—had been poured around the perimeter of the building. Flames licked above the first-floor window ledges.
“Cal!” Jeremy shouted from upstairs.
“Hang on!”
“Fire!” he said. “There’s a fire!”
I ran into the kitchen area and started throwing open cupboards. Even without any lights on, the glow from the flames was bright enough to make out shapes. I remembered seeing a fire extinguisher somewhere when we were opening cabinets and closets to see how well equipped the place was.
I found one under the sink. Not a huge one, but something that would do the trick to put out a small kitchen fire. The canister was no thicker than a soup can, and about a foot and a half tall. Maybe it would be enough to get us out the door. I grabbed it and pulled the pin that would allow foam to be propelled from it once I squeezed the trigger.
Then it occurred to me that there might be another way out.
Taking the extinguisher with me, I went up to the second floor, where I found Jeremy with his backpack slung over his shoulder.
“This way!” he said, heading toward the sliding glass doors that led to the elevated deck.
That was what I’d been thinking. The fire was at ground level, but the deck was attached to the second floor. We could escape through the glass doors, take the stairs down the side of the house and jump over the flames. If they were too high to do that, we could leap off the deck into the sand. I was confident it would break our fall.
Jeremy was heading for the doors when suddenly I reached for his arm and said, “No.”
“What?”
“That’s the way he wants us to go. It’s the one way out he’s left for us.”
Jeremy looked at me wide-eyed. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying he wants us to go out that door.”
“Who’s he?”
The smell of smoke was getting stronger. The flames surrounding the first floor of the house were casting light into the second-floor windows.
“What’s gonna happen if we go out that way?” Jeremy asked, pointing to the deck.
We get picked off, I thought.
“It’s not safe.”
“It’s not safe to stay here!”
That was true, too.
If this guy Duckworth had warned me about was outside waiting for us to come onto the deck, where would he be?
The boardwalk. The roughly hundred-foot-long raised walkway that led over the grassy area to the beach. It would be the perfect place for someone to wait, rifle trained on the entry to the deck, and take us out, one after the other. A night scope would do the trick, but even without one, we’d be pretty visible. It was a clear night sky, and the fire was doing wonders to light up the surroundings.
“Back downstairs,” I said.
“You knew this was going to happen?” Jeremy asked, trailing me down the steps to the first floor. “That’s why you said we had to go?”
“I got a warning,” I said. “That guy we met. On the beach.”
“What? How did he—”
“Not now.”
We were at the back door. I unlocked it. One hand was on the doorknob, the other on the extinguisher.
“Soon as we get out, run like hell, but stay low, try not to be seen, be quiet. Go to the place next door, the house on the east side, hide someplace, anyplace, wait for me to call when the coast is cle
ar.”
“What about the car?”
“No time. Takes too long to get in, start it. He’ll be on us.” I looked at him, placed a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to be okay.”
He nodded, but he looked far from convinced. Maybe that was because I didn’t look all that convincing.
“You ready?”
Another nod.
I turned the knob, which was hot on this side, and pulled the door open, squeezing the trigger on the extinguisher at the same time, aiming it low at the source. All I had to do was clear us a narrow path. Once we were a foot or two from the building, we wouldn’t have to worry about the flames any more.
Only about taking a bullet.
I doused the ground with foam, smothering the flames in our path. “I’ll go first,” I said.
I stepped out, took a few strides to the Honda and crouched behind the fender. I waved Jeremy forward. He scooted out of the house and joined me by the car. Now we could see just how bad the fire was. The flames were spreading up the walls of the building, some of them licking the eaves of the second floor.
I pointed to the closest neighboring house. “Make yourself scarce.”
Jeremy gave my arm a squeeze and slipped away into the darkness. His feet crunched on the gravel—most of the driveways around here were crushed shells rather than stone—but it couldn’t be heard over the roar of the fire.
I put down the extinguisher and took out the gun, which had been tucked under my belt. Slowly I moved from one end of the car to the other, which afforded me a better view of the boardwalk that led to the beach. I had to blink a few times to focus and adjust my eyes to the darkness.
As I’d suspected, there was someone there. Little more than a dark figure, barely illuminated by the flames. He had something in his hands, and it was aimed in the direction of the deck.
He had to be wondering why it was taking us so long to come out. It didn’t seem likely he’d stay there much longer. After about thirty seconds of watching him, I could sense his impatience. He lowered the weapon, took several steps closer to the beach house. He stopped, cocked his head, studied the place, then took two more steps in my direction.
I grasped my gun in both hands and rested my arms across the top of the trunk to steady my aim. If this were the movies, I’d be able to drop this asshole from here in one shot. But it was dark, my guy was a good seventy feet away, and, standing with his side to me, he presented as a narrow target.
I needed him closer.
He’d gone to a lot of trouble to kill us. I didn’t expect him to give up. But things hadn’t gone as planned, and now he had to be wondering if he’d fucked up. He continued to move slowly toward my location until he was at the top of the set of steps that led down from the boardwalk to the open area between our beach house and the one to the west.
He was only thirty feet away now.
He came around the corner of the house and saw the gap in the flames where the door was. I thought I saw him mouth an obscenity.
I said, “Freeze!”
Sometimes you go with the phrase everyone knows. Of course, when you shout something like that at someone, they move. Maybe not a lot, but it’s a jolt to hear that yelled at you. His body tensed, and he turned in my direction. I could see now that what he’d been carrying was a rifle.
Takes a little longer to raise one of those and aim. It was no six-shooter.
“Don’t even think of it!” I said.
But darned if he didn’t go and think of it anyway.
He went to bring the weapon up into a firing position. I pulled the trigger.
I must have caught him in his left shoulder. He spun hard to the right, stumbled back. But he managed to hold onto the rifle even as he went down to the ground.
I stood, but moved to the center of the car, where my body was at least partly shielded up to my chest. I still had the gun in both hands, my arms extended over the roof of the vehicle.
“Stay down!” I shouted.
He’d landed on his side, had rolled over onto his back, and was struggling to get into a sitting position. I figured I had the better part of four seconds to get to him before he could attempt to line me up in his sights again.
I came around the car and charged. Arms pumping at my sides, gun in my right hand.
He saw me coming, and he had to know he didn’t have time, but it didn’t stop him from trying. He went to swing the rifle in my direction, but before he could, I launched a kick directly at his face.
Got him, too.
His head snapped back and his upper body thudded to the ground. He lost his grip on the rifle. I snatched the weapon, tossed it, and stood over him, my gun aimed squarely at his head. The fire made his sweat-drenched face glow like neon.
It was my first really good look at our would-be assassin. He was about five ten, a hundred and eighty pounds, mid-forties, gray hair cut to within an eighth of an inch of his scalp.
I probably did something approaching a double-take as I asked him, “Where the hell is the other guy?”
By “the other guy,” I meant the man Barry Duckworth had emailed me a picture of.
Cory Calder.
This was not that guy.
FIFTY-FIVE
CALDER watched the Honda pull in behind the beach house. Saw Pilford and the old guy get out, go into the house.
He scurried after the car as it passed his cabin and hid himself behind a hedge that bordered the road. A good spot for keeping an eye on the place.
He’d been thinking about how to do this.
He knew he was going to have to shoot them both. The old dude was there watching out for Pilford, so he would have to take him out, one way or the other. Maybe there was a time when Calder would have felt badly about that. After all, it wasn’t this bodyguard who’d run down a girl with a car and got clean away with it. But when you thought about it, wasn’t he just as guilty? Weren’t all the people connected to Jeremy Pilford guilty to one degree or another? Weren’t his lawyers, who’d used that ridiculous defense, guilty? Wasn’t his mother guilty for so fucking him up that he didn’t know right from wrong?
Sure, Pilford was the most guilty. But so many others had played a part. And this man looking out for him was another one for the list.
Cory thought the simplest way to handle it was to knock on the door. Whoever answered first got shot first. Then, when the other person came running to see what had happened, he would shoot him too.
Pretty straightforward.
It made him wonder if maybe he hadn’t been overthinking things with the others. The dog chowing down on Craig Pierce, the whole tattoo number on the other guy.
Just shoot the fuckers.
Kill them.
That was what he would do.
He watched them go inside, turn on the lights. Ground floor first, then the second floor.
Let them get ready for bed, he thought. Let them turn off the lights, then bang on the door. They’d be more disoriented.
But then he thought, what if the old dude’s got a gun? If he was hired to protect the Big Baby, he probably had one.
Shit.
He might come to the door with the damn thing in his hand. What then?
Think think think.
Maybe bang on the door, but not stand there like a moron waiting for the old guy to blow his brains out. Bang on the door, then hide. Behind the car, or the trash cans set a few feet to one side. Guy comes out, looks around, looks the other way, then blam.
Yeah, that could work.
Cory Calder realized he was very nervous. Far more nervous than he’d been when they’d grabbed Pierce or Gaffney. Those two weren’t armed, and once they were knocked out, they didn’t present any physical threat.
This time, it was different.
But he’d come this far, and he wasn’t about to pack it in. He was going to do this, he was going to shoot those two bastards and maybe even stay long enough to get a picture of a dead Big Baby that he could upload to the
Just Deserts site, and then everyone in the world would know—
What the hell?
A bright flickering appeared at the perimeter of the beach house. It had started in one spot, then quickly spread around the building.
It was a fire.
Cory squinted. He made out a shadowy figure, carrying something long, running from the corner of the building to the boardwalk. The man—Cory was pretty sure it was a man—went up the boardwalk steps two at a time, then took a position at the midpoint.
What was happening? What was going on?
He very quickly figured that out. Someone else was out to steal the glory from him.
Someone else was going to get Pilford.
“It’s not fair!” he whispered to himself. “It’s not fair!”
He stepped out from behind the hedge at the end of the gravel driveway that led up to the beach house. Frustration coursed through him like an electric charge. What should he do?
With the house on fire, Pilford and the old man were likely to come charging out at any moment. But from which door? There was already fire trailing across the one they’d used to go inside. The glass doors that led to the deck were on the bay side, and it looked as though this other guy, who appeared to be carrying a rifle, was waiting for Pilford to come out that way.
So he could shoot him.
“No!” Cory said aloud. “It’s not right.”
But what was he to do? If he wanted to shoot Pilford himself, he was going to have to shoot this—this interloper—first. Which meant that now he would have to shoot three people instead of two.
He began to hyperventilate.
How dare this person steal his thunder? How dare he go after the glory that Cory had worked so hard to achieve?
The fire was spreading quickly. Lights that had been on in the beach house now were off. Cory could see the man on the boardwalk aiming the rifle at the building. Pilford and the old dude were probably making their escape onto the deck now.
But the man did not shoot.
Suddenly, the back door opened. Cory could make out the man and the kid. The man had something in his hand—a fire extinguisher!—and he put out enough of the flames to allow them to exit the house.