Don't Leave Me (21 page)

As she got in her car Sandy reflected that the strain in Samson’s voice was as real as a fingerprint. What you think of a suspect is often an accumulation of little details. Sometimes your initial impression is confirmed, other times realigned after multiple observations.

Samson struck her from the start as truthful, but hiding something. Something big. Mooney thought it was all a ruse, pointing to Samson’s ultimate guilt.

She thought the opposite, and the sound of his voice was another piece on the scales of her intuition.

Mooney, of course, was one of the new breed who thought “gut instinct” was something you used for ordering food, not solving cases.

She’d just see about that.

.

Chuck had taught him. Back when Stan was six and he wanted to fight like Chuck. He wanted to be able to beat up the mean kids and there were a lot of them, oh yes. But Chuck said, Don’t use your fists, use your mind. But my mind isn’t like anybody’s, Stan had said. That’s the good part, Chuck said. Things stick to your mind.

Chuck was doing his magic then, and he was learning things, like memory tricks. Chuck taught him that trick about using pictures to make numbers. Like a duck is the number two, because if you look at a duck on the water it’s sort of shaped like a two. It made Stan laugh the first time. And then you can think of a number three like some handcuffs. Opened up, they look like a three. Chuck had some toy handcuffs and showed Stan. That’s what they looked like. Four, that was a sailboat. Five, that was a hook.

And then Stan started memorizing numbers and it was easy. He could do it almost without trying.

He could even tell Chuck to hold up cards, a lot of them, one at a time, and then he’d tell Chuck what cards he’d held up and even the order of them.

So he could use his mind like that and sometimes that made Stan feel good when he was feeling bad.

Like now, he was feeling bad, but he was also using his mind just like Chuck said.

Nobody was coming when he pounded on the door.

He’d make them come all right.

The sink worked. He could run water. There wasn’t anything in any of the cupboards. It was like it was supposed to be a bar once, but it wasn’t anymore. What kind of a crazy place was this? Maybe it was for torture. Maybe they tortured you here by running water over your face.

Now Stan was running the water.

He cupped his hands and got some. He went to the door and threw the water at the bottom of the door. He was going to make it wet on the other side.

They’d see that. They’d think things.

Stan left the water running, and took two more handfuls and threw them at the bottom of the door.

“That feels good!” he shouted.

And waited.

.

Pure survival instinct turned Chuck toward the bathroom window. He’d barely fit through.

The sound of the counter partition slamming mixed with the voices of two men. And the sound of feet heading toward the back.

Chuck palm-pushed the window sill.

It moved half an inch.

He looked back through the half open door and saw no one.

Then heard slamming and rooting around. He remembered seeing a back office, opposite the hallways leading to the bathroom. They were checking there, but it wouldn’t take long for them to realize their prey must be elsewhere.

And there’d be only the bathroom left.

Chuck used the heels of both palms.

Another half inch.

The sounds in the other room stopped.

Push!

The window loosened, and shoved open with a loud bang.

The scuffling of feet in the next room.

Head first, Chuck thrust himself through the portal to his only chance of survival.

It was eerily familiar to the SUV jump he’d made earlier in the evening. He hit the pavement behind the ranger station and had a quick choice.

Two roads, one narrow and leading upward. That was to his left.

The other one curved slightly down, to his right. It had the sharpest turn and would give him more immediate cover.

That’s where he ran.