CHAPTER
FORTY-SIX
Out back, the grass gave way quickly to
woods; small scrubby stuff up front, backed up by a thick forest of
brilliantly colored young hardwoods—a final insult to the
property’s nearly forgotten heritage as a farm.
Movement drew Jake’s attention to his
left as he saw a flash of Thorne’s back disappearing among the
colors. He followed at a dead run. With the sun resting low on the
horizon, streams of light painted a confusing mosaic through the
leaves, making it difficult to keep Thorne in sight. Jake couldn’t
see their quarry at all.
When Thorne stopped, Jake was with him
in an instant. “Where are they?”
Thorne gestured for silence, using the
muzzle of his pistol as an extension of his vision as he scanned
the forest for movement. “I saw him,” he whispered. “He’s
here.”
The words triggered a chill. Where
could he be, then? He didn’t have that much of a lead.
“There!” Jake pointed. “Isn’t that
blood?”
In the distance, they heard Melissa’s
plaintive voice. “Lauren! Lauren, honey, we’re
coming!”
Out in front, and off to the right,
they heard a child’s muffled cry. Together, they moved toward it,
following the blood trail and listening for additional
noise.
“Lauren!” This time it was Nick’s
voice, and they were getting closer.
Soon the woods opened up again, to
reveal another cleared field, with a dilapidated barn growing up
out of the center. Jake and Thorne stopped at the edge of the
clearing.
“What do you think?” Jake whispered.
“Are they inside?”
Thorne shook his head. “He’s too smart
to corner himself.”
“Then why . . .”
A rustle of leaves just inches to
their left brought both men around, their guns bearing down on the
terrified face of little Lauren. She screamed, yet even at five,
she understood the unasked question. “He dropped me!” she
shouted.
Jake saw the flash of steel the
instant he broke his aim. Wiggins came from nowhere, lunging out of
the foliage, propelling his knife in a huge downward arc. Jake got
an arm up but couldn’t deflect it all. He grunted as the glancing
blow left a wake of torn flesh down the side of his ribs, and he
tumbled for cover in the leaves.
The speed of the attack caught Thorne
off guard, but once he recovered, he struck like a snake, firing
two quick punches, one to the stump of what used to be Wiggins’s
hand, and the other to his face. The gunman went down hard but
rolled fluidly to his feet. As he took a martial-arts stance, or a
pitiful imitation of one, he seemed to notice for the first time
that his right arm was four inches shorter than his left. He
shifted his eyes to the stump, and in that instant, Thorne dropped
him with a chilling elbow shot to the jaw.
Thorne was out of control. He muscled
his trophy off the ground and punched him again. “Who are you, you
son of a bitch?”
The man said nothing. For an instant,
Jake wondered if the guy was already dead.
This time Thorne’s fury took the form
of a savage kick to the gunman’s testicles. The mystery man made a
gagging sound and tried to clutch at himself, but Thorne launched
him back with yet another kick, this one to his face.
“Stop it!” Melissa shrieked, appearing
with Nick at the edge of the clearing.
“What’s your name, asshole?” Thorne yelled, preparing for
another kick.
“Wiggins!” Melissa answered for the
gunman, even as she ran to be with her daughter. “He already told
me his name is Wiggins!”
Thorne shook his head. “I want to hear
it from him.”
“Not here!” Nick yelled, clearly torn
between joining his wife and confrontingThorne. His skin gray with
pain and fear, he chose the latter. “Not in front of my daughter,
Thorne!”
Thorne looked thoroughly disgusted.
“Do you know what this rat turd tried to do?”
It was Jake’s turn. “This isn’t the
plan,” he said, shooting a glance toward the terrified little girl
who sat hugging her knees at the base of a tree. The blood from her
chin left a sweat trail down the front of her neck, which Melissa
tried to wipe away with her one good hand. “Let’s stick with the
plan.”
Thorne laughed loud and hard. “Plan!
What plan? You don’t have a plan, Jake!”
Jake felt his face flush. “We
agreed—”
“We didn’t agree to shit!” Thorne declared.
“You came up with the pea-brain idea that Mr. Terminator here would
spill his guts. All we had to do was say ‘pretty please.’ ” He
laughed again and launched another kick to Wiggins’s ribs. “Just
like Murder, She Wrote,
right, ace?”
“But my daughter—” Nick
said.
“What about her? Get her outta here,
if you want. I’m not stopping you!”
Nick swallowed hard, then glanced
nervously over toward his wife and daughter before whispering, “You
can’t do this here. I
don’t want that kind of involvement. That’s not what I signed on
for.”
Thorne set his jaw angrily. A long
moment passed as he struggled with his temper, and when he finally
spoke, his voice trembled. “You’re in this up to your eyeballs,
Nick. Remember that. Don’t you dare think even for a minute that
you’re not a part of it all.” He leveled a forefinger and lowered
his voice. Anger burned in his expression, genuine loathing. “You
do yourself a favor and think real long and real hard before you go
soft, you hear?” He let the words sink in for a moment. “Now, why
don’t you and the missus go back to the house and clean up? Jake
and I will take care of what needs to be done. Tomorrow morning,
you can tell your kid all about how real nightmares can seem.” He
paused again, for effect. “You’ve got a secret now, Nick, and I
expect you to keep it. Now get outa here. Go find that hotel you
were talking about and make sure it’s a million miles from
here.”
“Suppose someone sees you?”
That one caught Thorne off guard. He
scowled as he considered the question. “What’s inside that barn?”
he asked, pointing.
“It’s just a storage shed,” Nick said
as Thorne began dragging his prey in that direction.
Thorne called over his shoulder,
“You’re with me,
ace!”
Jake ignored him and took a step
closer to his old friend. In the distance, he could hear children’s
voices calling for their mom and dad. “Is that your
boys?”
Nick nodded. “I guess they just got
home.”
Jake nodded back. It was an awkward
moment. “Look, Nick . . .”
“You’re welcome, Jake, okay? Let’s
just leave it at that.”
Jake stood still for a moment, wanting
to say something but unable to construct the sentence. Finally, he
nodded. “Okay, Nick. Thanks. And I’m sorry.”
Nick nodded, too, but looked away.
“I’m glad I could do my part. Now, just do us all a favor and end
it.”
“About your wife . . .”
“Just end it, Jake. I’ll worry about
my wife.”
It was a sickening thing to watch.
Wiggins sat bolt upright in the middle of the dusty skeleton of a
barn while Thorne secured the man’s neck directly to the
twelve-by-twelve center support column with five loops of duct
tape. A tourniquet at the gunman’s wrist, fashioned out of an old
rag and a screwdriver, kept him from bleeding to death, even as
blood and snot continued to leak freely from his shattered nose.
With the man’s neck secured, Thorne went to work on his arms,
binding them with loop after loop of tape, just above the
elbows.
“You like to be called Wiggins?”
Thorne growled as he worked. “That’s fine with me. What I want to
know is who you work for. And why. Every little detail.” Thorne
tore off the last piece of tape and tossed the roll aside. “Won’t
it be fun?”
Jake had never seen Thorne so
animated, so entertained.
“Who do you work for?” Thorne paused
for just a beat—barely long enough for the man to have formed an
answer, even if he’d wanted to—then loosed a backhand smack that
scattered a bloody mist into the air.
Jake felt his stomach turn and moved
his head to look away when the most amazing thing happened. Wiggins
smiled. His teeth—what was left of them—were shiny with blood, but
the son of a bitch thought this was funny.
And that really pissed Thorne off. He fired a kick
into the prisoner’s tattered hand. Wiggins’s face knotted up tight
against the pain, but as soon as the wave of agony passed, the
smile returned.
“Jesus Christ, Thorne,” Jake moaned.
“Is this it? You’re just going to beat him to death?”
Thorne stayed poised for another shot
but moved his head to see Jake. “Actually, that’s up to him. He
doesn’t have to die. I’ll stop as soon as he starts
talking.”
Wiggins actually chuckled. And earned
himself a kick in the ribs.
It was an obscene cycle. Wiggins
seemed to grow stronger through the beating, refusing on the
strength of his spirit alone to use the one key Thorne had given
him to unlock his dungeon of pain. And the more he held out, the
more vicious Thorne’s attacks became.
After maybe three minutes, Jake
actually found himself feeling sorry for the son of a bitch. Then
he thought of Travis’s face, and he made himself imagine the
suffering his son must have endured.
He thought of this animal hanging
Carolyn in her jail cell, and he conjured the images of the grief
endured by the family of that little girl in the hospital, whose
only involvement in any of this was to have the misfortune of
getting sick at the same time as a stranger down the
hall.
The rage Jake summoned up was enough
for him to root Thorne on for another minute, but ultimately, it
was of no use. He found himself desperately searching for an
alternative to prolonged beating. What was infuriating was the
man’s defiance. This asshole’s life lay in their hands, yet his
battered, swollen eyes continued to say, screw you.
Standing there, Jake had a kind of
epiphany. He realized that in this battle of wills between
professional painmongers, winning and losing were not measured by
who had a heartbeat at the end of the day. A man won when he denied
his adversary the pleasure of witnessing a breakdown. Men like
these had inflicted too much pain, too many times, merely to be
beaten into submission. Pain didn’t frighten them anymore. Neither,
apparently, did the thought of death.
So what did?
Frantically, he scanned the interior
of the barn, searching for the answer. The far wall was lined with
tools: wordworking, painting, plumbing. Nothing there. Just to the right of those
was a narrow shelf stacked high with all manner and types of
chemical supplies. All of the labels were turned out just so, with
the hazards warnings clearly visible. He looked away, then snapped
his head back again. Thats
it!
“Stop!” Jake commanded, freezing
Thorne in the middle of an open-handed backswing.
“Stay out of this, Jake,” Thorne said.
“If you can’t take it—”
“Shut up. It’s my turn.”
“Your turn?” The thought seemed somehow
unthinkable.
“Yeah. My turn. He tried to kill my family. I get
to take my shot at him. Can’t do worse than you, right,
Thorne?”
The battered man actually
grinned.
Thorne hesitated, then shrugged and
backed off.
With Thorne out of the way, Jake
walked past the prisoner toward the storage shelf, out of Wiggins’s
field of view. What he needed had to be here somewhere. “Here’s how
I see it, buddy,” he said to Wiggins’s back as he rummaged through
the containers. “Death is the gold medal for people like you. Pain
gives you a hardon. It’s sick, but what the hell? So’s making a
living killing women and children.”
He rummaged through all kinds of
chemicals, pausing for just a second at a bottle of insecticide
before moving on. Ah! He found one that would work perfectly. Now
he needed a rag.
“With that arm of yours, I figure
you’re pretty much out of business,” he went on. “Once word gets
out in your circles, I imagine things’ll get pretty intense for
you.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Thorne
barked, his hands on his hips.
Here’s
one. Jake found an old rag on a bench. “Just pay
attention, ace.” He needed
gloves, too, and they were right next to the rag. Leave it to Mr.
Safety to have rubber gloves in his shop.
He strolled back to the prisoner and
stooped down in front of him. “The way I see it, we’re wasting our
time here, right? You’re betting you can hold out just long enough
for Thorne here to kill you. That lets you off the hook and somehow
earns you special bragging rights in hell. Am I
close?”
The gunman just stared defiantly, his
left eye all but swollen shut, his right one not much
better.
Jake’s expression changed as he pulled
the black rubber gloves onto his hands and opened up the brown
glass bottle. As the cap came off, the faint stench of rotten eggs
filled the air.
He held up the bottle and displayed
the label as a sommelier might display a good bottle of wine.
“Sulfuric acid,” he explained. “Great for cleaning concrete, but
man, you’ve got to dilute it. Otherwise, it burns like
shit.”
He tipped the bottle and poured a drop
of the clear, concentrated liquid onto Wiggins’s pant leg, just
above the knee. Instantly, the cotton began to degrade, and the
rotten-egg odor became unbearable. Soon it was joined by the smell
of burning flesh as the acid ate away a chunk of flesh about the
size of a dime.
The man’s eyes were wide now. This
clearly was beyond what he’d mentally prepared himself for. Pain he
understood. Now his imagination was taking him into uncharted
territory.
Jake smiled. “As I said, death comes
too easily to you. The consequences don’t mean anything. For all I
know, after you finished with my son, you went out and had a
pizza.” The very thought of it made Jake’s hands tremble. Wiggins
saw the tremors and smirked.
“The hands?” Jake asked. “You think
that’s funny? A sign of weakness?” He smiled. “Well, you got me.
I’ve never been much of a killer. Even the thought of killing a
worthless coward like you makes my stomach flop.”
Thorne had had about all he could
stand. “Oh, for Christ’s sake . . .”
“Shut up, Thorne!” Jake yelled. The
suddenness of the outburst made Wiggins jump. Jake turned back to
his prisoner. “Seems to me we’re a bad match, Wiggins. I don’t want
to kill you, yet you seem content to die.” He moved in very close
now, close enough to smell the other man’s bloody breath. And he
whispered, “If you don’t talk, I’m gonna make you
live.”
Wiggins shot a look to Thorne that
said, This guy is
nuts.
“You’re right,” Jake said, answering
his thoughts. “I’m over the edge. Out of my mind. And here’s my
one-time-only offer. You’ve seen how this stuff works. You’ve felt
it burn. Well, the next dose goes in your eyes.”
He fell silent, allowing the impact of
his threat to settle in. “Really, that’s it. One splash and it’s
all over. Ten seconds later your eyeballs are charcoal, and we’re
done here. We’ll just let you go.”
Wiggins’s eyes grew wild as he glanced
again toward Thorne. Jake caught the glance and smiled. He had him.
“Imagine what it would be like not to see. You couldn’t find your
victims, even if you had two hands to kill them with.”
He pulled away now, as his words took
their toll. He actually enjoyed the look of horror in Wiggins’s
eyes. “You’ll be ugly as hell, too. Repulsive burn scars all over
your face. Everyone will point and whisper. Get a load of
that guy, they’ll say. Not
that you’ll be able to see the finger-pointers, of
course.”
Wiggins’s breathing picked up, and his
red, swollen eyes darted back and forth between Jake’s face and the
bottle.
“Okay, then, let’s start with
something easy. Who are you working for?”
The man said nothing, looking once
again for Thorne to resume the beating. Panic was written all over
him.
“Don’t look at him, look at me,” Jake said, his face showing cold fury.
“It seems so right, don’t you think? I don’t get to see my family
again, and you don’t get to see anything. I’ll count down for you.
At zero, the lights go out. Five . . .”
Wiggins watched with growing terror as
Jake soaked the rag with acid. The excess trickled off onto
Wiggins’s pants, instantly burning a half dozen holes into his
legs.
“. . . four . . .”
The rag was soaked now, disintegrating
under the onslaught of chemical as Jake brought it ever closer to
the man’s face. The odor of sulfur brought tears to his
eyes.
“. . . two . . . one—”
“Frankel!” Wiggins yelled it loud,
screamed it, really, in case Jake might not have heard it. “Peter
Frankel hired me!”
The rag was only an inch away, and
Wiggins shut his eyes tight, as if that would actually stop
anything. For just a second, Jake kept the rag suspended there,
letting the stench pour off it, then he pulled it
away.
He turned to Thorne, who himself
looked unnerved by the display. “Okay, Thorne, I think he’s ready
now.”
Two hours later it was done. A wall of
silence, it turned out, was just like any other wall. Once cracked,
it just kept crumbling. Wiggins gave them everything they needed,
and they never had to lay another hand on him. He was a broken man,
and Jake accepted that he’d been the one to break him, though he
wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
When the gut-spilling was done, he
pulled Thorne off to a corner of the barn. “So what’s
next?”
“With him?” Thorne said, gesturing
without turning his head.
Jake nodded. “Yeah, with Wiggins or
Dalton or whoever he is.” During the interrogation, Wiggins had
given up his birth name: Clyde Dalton. “What do we do with
him?”
Thorne gave Jake another one of his
condescending looks. “What do you think? Three of us go for a ride, two of us
come back.”
Jake’s stomach knotted. He’d spent
nearly half his life running away from a murder charge.
It just doesn’t seem right . .
.
Thorne read the look and rolled his
eyes. “Relax, Jake. You won’t have to do shit, okay? This one will
be on me.”
They heard a noise and turned. Wiggins
was gone! Disappeared! The tape that had once bound his neck
dangled limply off to the side.
In that split second, Jake had only
one thought: How does this guy keep
going? He was surprised Wiggins could even
stand.
Thorne stomped the dusty floor.
“Shit!”
They both drew their weapons. “Where’d
he go?” Jake asked.
Thorne glared. “Not far.”
“Is there a back door?”
“How would I know? Go look for one.”
Then, to the dusty air, he added, “You’re a dead man,
Wiggins!”
It was dark now, inside and out, and
the single bank of fluorescent lights overhead did little to
lighten the shadows in the barn. Jake couldn’t bring himself to
move forward. Death was out there somewhere—his own, in all likelihood, and he didn’t want
to face it.
“Go on,” Thorne ordered. I’ll
go—”
A loud thok—like the sound of a well-hit
baseball—cut his words short as Wiggins’s good hand brought an ax
handle slicing out of the darkness onto the top of Thorne’s head.
Thorne dropped instantly, unconscious even before his knees
buckled. In the instant it took for Jake to react and swing his
Glock around, Wiggins rewound his swing and let it fly against the
muzzle of Jake’s weapon. Another home run, launching the pistol
deep into the dark shadows.
Jake saw the third swing coming from a
mile away and ducked, stumbling over Thorne’s thick form on the
floor as he scrambled for the chrome .45. Wiggins kicked it away
and brought the makeshift club down hard against the wooden floor.
Twice evading the club by inches, Jake brought his arms in close
and rolled quickly to his right—a maneuver he hadn’t tried since he
was a little kid rolling down his next-door neighbor’s
hill.
Wiggins kept coming; amazingly fast,
frighteningly strong.
Up on all fours now, and fighting for
balance, Jake found himself back at the post that minutes before
had been Wiggins’s personal torture rack. He felt the next blow
coming through the air, dodging without looking. The barn shook as
the ax handle splintered against the twelve-by-twelve
post.
But Wiggins held on, his club
transformed into a ragged spear. He lunged, but Jake was on his
feet again and able to maneuver around it. Grabbing a claw hammer
from a nearby shelf, he heaved it in Wiggins’s direction, buying
himself an extra second as a glancing blow off the man’s shoulder
spun him in an awkward pirouette. Jake opened the distance by two
steps and spotted a pitchfork resting in the corner. In one fluid
motion, he brought it round and faced his attacker.
For an instant, Jake thought Wiggins’s
momentum would impale his guts on the tines, but the man reacted
quickly, skidding to a stop with barely an inch to
spare.
He locked onto Jake’s gaze and smiled.
The blood on his face and in his mouth wasn’t shiny anymore; it had
turned a crusty brown.
“Guess you win, Donovan,” he said,
looking warily at the tines. At this point, even the slightest
twitch on his part might bring them surging forward. “Looks like
I’m your prisoner, after all.”
Jake knew his attacker was playing for
time. He stared at the killer’s heart and wondered how hard he’d
have to push to split it open. He locked his jaw, tensed his
muscles. Decision
time.
“Want to tie me up again?” Wiggins
asked.
“No thanks,” came a voice from behind.
In a long-drawnout moment that Jake would later look back on as
impossibly distended, Thorne, who’d materialized out of nowhere,
fired a kick to the base of Wiggins’s spine, plunging the killer
belly-first into the pitchfork.
Jake held on against the impact and
stared, mesmerized, as Wiggins’s eyes widened, and his mouth opened
and closed uselessly. The killer struggled to find a breath as the
rusted steel tore through his gut, but the best he could do was
cough up a torrent of blood. Fixing Jake with one last amazed look,
he collapsed.
“Son of a bitch almost split my head
in half,” Thorne declared as Jake struggled to support the dead
man’s weight on the tines. His arms and shoulders screamed at the
effort, but they seemed somehow separate from his body. Seconds
passed. Finally, he released his grip and slumped with the corpse
onto the earthen floor.
Jake followed Thorne in the plumbing
van as they drove hours into the night. Paved roads gave way to
dirt roads, which finally became fire trails. When they stopped,
Jake had no idea where they were exactly, but civilization was far
away.
Once parked, Thorne strolled up to
Jake’s window. “How’d your passenger behave himself?”
Jake just glared. If there was humor
in any of this, he didn’t see it.
Thorne gestured with his hands. “Well,
this place is as good as any. Help me dig the hole.”
They’d wrapped the body in a
threadbare wool blanket to carry it out of the woods surrounding
Nick’s house and laid it in the back of the plumbing van. Now, as
they hauled it out into the crisp night air, the Army-green fabric
had transformed to a dark copper color, and the smell of death was
overpowering.
They worked silently to dig the hole,
using tools taken from Nick’s barn. They dug it just deep enough to
shelter the remains from hikers and hungry animals. The body made a
wet sound as they dropped it into the earthen scar, and for the
millionth time that night, Jake successfully fought off the urge to
vomit.
The next order of business was the van
itself. Smeared with blood, and no doubt covered with fingerprints,
it had to be destroyed. They drove it a mile or so back down the
trail, primed it with whatever was left in the bottom of a
twogallon gas can, then ignited it with a road flare.
None of it was as gratifying as Jake
had hoped. As recently as that morning, he’d fantasized about
killing the man who’d attacked his wife and child, but now that he
was watching the last of this nightmare being consumed by flames,
he just felt . . . guilty.
He walked back to the rental and slid
into the shotgun seat, slamming the door behind him. Thorne dropped
the transmission into drive and started back down the mountain.
Neither of them spoke as they watched the billowing black smoke
cloud envelop the trail.
“He blew away your friends, Jake,”
Thorne said at last. “Tried to kill your family. Nearly killed me.
Almost killed you. All we did was balance the
account.”
Jake stared straight ahead, still
silent, only now comprehending that—at least to some extent—he’d
become what everyone thought he’d been all along.
He checked his watch and sighed.
Two-fifteen. Finally, it was a new day, and come hell or high
water, it would all be over before the calendar turned another
page. He leaned back against the headrest and closed his
eyes.
Sleep came instantly.