Edge of Midnight (16 page)

“Hmm. Interesting. They didn’t look like twins.”

She was pathetically grateful to have given him something he wanted, but the reprieve was all too brief.

“Kevin McCloud told you where he hid the tapes,” he said. “I had you in my rifle scope. I saw that son-of-a-bitch hand you that notebook. I never forget a face. Particularly not a pretty one.”

His words blew her mind wide open and three hundred and sixty degrees around with their terrible implications. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You’re talking about fifteen years ago? Those guys chasing Kev, trying to kill him…it was all true?”

“You know damn well it’s true,” the man snarled. “We didn’t know your name, or I would have taken care of you then. And that stubborn fuck Kevin never told us dick, no matter what we did to him. And we were creative. You would not believe the crazy shit we tried on that kid.”

Her mind shied away in horror from the images his words invoked. “You tortured Kev?” she whispered. “Oh, my God.”

He gave her a mock bow. “C’est moi. Then I saw you on TV. Remember that interview about your bookstore? You must have been feeling pretty confident, hmm? Must have thought I’d given up.”

“My God,” she whispered helplessly.

He plucked at the buttons of her blouse with the tip of his knife. They popped off, the shirt gaping. “Where did he hide those tapes?”

“I—I don’t know anything about any tapes—”

“I’ll start with your ear.” The knife dug in beneath her earlobe. “I’m sorry to get you all bloody before we play, but if you insist—”

“No! Please! He stopped me outside the library,” she quavered.

“What did he tell you?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, struggled to remember. “He said…he said someone was trying to kill him. He didn’t say who.”

“And the notebook he gave you? What did you do with it?”

Liv hesitated, her body vibrating with stark fear.

“I don’t need to worry about fingerprints, or genetic material,” he murmured, almost idly. “They’ll never find your body. There’s a plastic tarp to catch the mess. I’ll wrap up what’s left of you after I’m done. Tuck you in a nice, deep, wormy hole. It’s all ready for you.”

She hoped desperately that she was not killing Sean by saying this. “He told me to give it to his brother.” Her voice was barely audible.

“And did you?”

She nodded, insofar as she could with a knife at her throat.

“Tell me all about this notebook, Olivia. What was in it?”

“Ah, sketches,” she squeaked. “I just leafed through it. Landscapes, I think. Animals, birds, maybe.”

“Anything written?”

“He wrote a note to his brother,” she admitted.

“What did it say?” His voice was frighteningly gentle.

Her eyes overflowed. She hated herself for her lack of self-control. “I couldn’t read it.” She forced the words out. “It was in some strange code. I don’t know anything about any tapes. I wish to God I did.”

“Ah.”

There was a long, terrible silence. She shut her eyes, and waited for him to do something horrible to her with that knife.

“You know what?” he asked, in a tone of discovery.

Her eyes opened a careful slit.

“I believe you,” he said wonderingly. “I actually do. You poor unlucky little bitch. You really don’t know fuck-all about any of it, do you? All of this trouble and expense and exposure. All for nothing.”

Her teeth chattered. The hideous leer spreading over his face killed any hope before it could surface in her mind.

“Unfortunately for you, this state of affairs is no longer current.” His face was a mask of regret. “You know way too much now. Nothing personal, babydoll. I’ll try to make it up to you by making your last moments very sensual.” He wrenched her blouse open. Buttons flew, pattering onto the tarp around her. The fabric gave way, fell off her in shreds. The knife bit through the cord that held the cups of her bra together.

“I love to look at naked girls. Never get tired of it,” he said genially. He grabbed the waistband of her pants, started in on the buttons.

She began to scream. Grabbed the nail, closed her fingers over it until it bit into her palm. Yanked with desperate strength.

This was no deranged stalker. This had been carefully planned, by someone with time and leisure to rig an ambush, with electronic backup, skilled in demolitions, who had studied the area meticulously.

A professional. Which wrenched open doors in his mind. Doors best left shut, if he meant to maintain a passing resemblance to sanity.

The only time Liv could have attracted the attention of a person like T-Rex was when she was hanging out with a McCloud. This was just the kind of fucked up shit that routinely happened to the men in his family. Dad had trained them for this stuff since they were born.

Orem Lake gleamed in the pink glow of dawn, its surface ruffled by the wind. It was a small, pristine lake, the ice-cold water a clear blue-green. There was only a handful of seasonal hunting and fishing cabins.

The monitor told him to bear left. He jerked up the emergency brake, and leaped out of the truck, following shallow depressions in the grass that led up into the towering forest. He passed a Jeep, its plate number obscured by spattered mud. The track dead-ended into a rock face. The cabin was almost hidden in the undergrowth. It was a ruin, siding rotten, roof almost bare of shingles. It perched on a low cliff of black granite, smeared with green, yellow and orange lichen, shrouded by vast, moss-draped trees.

No one had used this place in years, possibly decades. If not for the beacon, he would never have found her. No one would have.

If she was still alive.

He pushed the bowel-loosening wave of fear away. If T-Rex had wanted her dead quickly, he could have offed her at Chaeffer Canyon.

Doubts chewed at him. Con and Davy, bitching about how he never considered consequences. Fine and good, if it was only himself getting fucked up, but this was Liv. He wondered how far behind the cops were. If Liv’s chances were better if he waited for backup.

He could doom her by racing in like a lone-ranger asshole, or he could doom her by waiting. He didn’t want to spend the rest of what passed for his life seeing Liv’s last moments, knowing he might have saved her if he’d been quicker, smarter. Like Kev’s pickup, endlessly falling in the back of his mind. He couldn’t go through it again.

He’d rather die.

Christ, how he wished he had Davy, Seth, and Con at his back. That he was packing his H&K, or the SIG. The Ruger packed a punch, but it was an emergency backup weapon, with only five shots.

But no. It was family policy not to store firearms at the Bluffs house, since it stood empty so much of the time.

Use your brain to think with, not your glands. The stern voices lecturing in his head slowed his headlong dash to a stagger.

But his goddamn brain wasn’t offering up any brilliant ideas.

A wrenching scream from the direction of the cabin propelled him like a bullet from a gun. To hell with his useless brain.

His glands were the best thing he had going for him, so fuck it.

The cabin was propped on scaffolding to level it out on the slope, so the windows that weren’t boarded up were too high to see through.

He scrambled up the slope towards the door. Shoved and tore his way through a jungle of thorny vines and hanging moss.

The door had a warped latch, and a rusty padlock dangling from it. Sean pushed the door. It shrieked on its hinges. So much for stealth.

Two bodies struggled on a shiny black plastic tarp in the dark, moldy room. The guy whipped around at the sound, white-rimmed, bulging blue eyes, in a thick bulldog face. He was straddling Liv. He could see her jeans-clad legs, flopping beneath the guy’s bulk.

Shit. He couldn’t shoot the guy with Liv right behind him. T-Rex spun around. A gun. Bullets blasted, punching into the walls, the door. Duck, tuck, and roll. Bullets whipped through his hair, his sleeve. One scored a white-hot line across his back. Filthy window glass shattered.

When he rolled up onto his feet, the guy had the gun to Liv’s head. His arm held her chin back. Her wrists were bound in front of her. She was naked to the waist. Blood trickled down her torso from the side of her neck, shockingly bright against her pale skin.

“Drop the gun, or I’ll blow her head off,” the guy said.

Sean assessed his options in that endless nanosecond, and sent a telepathic apology to Davy and Con as his fingers loosened and let go.

He hated to make them go through it again, but they had wives, families. They would get through it. And Sean had just been marking time since Kev died, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The gun, thudding to the floor, was the sound of the shoe dropping.

“Kick it over to me,” the guy instructed.

The gun made a whispering scrape as it slid across the dirty, ragged linoleum floor. He began slowly rising to his feet.

“Stay down on your knees, asshole. Hands behind your head.”

“The police will be along real soon,” Sean said, sinking back down. “She’s transmitting a radio signal from her shoe. Want to see it?”

“Yeah, of course,” the guy said. “Of course she is. Of course they are.” He let out a high-pitched giggle. “Just look at this. Should I gut-shoot you, and let you bleed to death? Or sever your spinal column and leave you paralyzed? I oughta leave you alive, with the door open, for the animals. You can witness yourself becoming part of the food chain.” He slid the barrel of the gun down over Liv’s throat, between her breasts. “I don’t even know where to begin. I want to eat her up.”

Liv shrieked as he chomped into her neck and he sloppily licked the stinging wound. She clutched the nail she had wrenched out of the wall as the cold gun barrel made its way back up her half-bare body. He tucked it beneath her chin, jabbing it painfully deep.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for fifteen years,” T-Rex said. He shoved her chin up with the gun and kissed her, his muscular tongue poking into her mouth. She tasted her own blood, and almost retched.

“As soon as I get him squared away, I’ll put away the gun, baby-doll,” he went on. “I’ll just use the knife. Lasts longer that way.”

The world narrowed down to a pinpoint of brilliant clarity.

She did not want to die slowly and horribly at the hands of this monster. A bullet in the head would at least be quick—and it might give Sean a chance. He deserved a chance. He was magnificent. Charging in to save her, against all odds, all hope or logic.

She convulsed. The gun barrel slipped up her neck, slick with blood and sweat. She jerked her bound hands, the nail protruding between her fingers, in what she hoped was the direction of his face, and sank her teeth into his wrist. The nail hit oily, slippery flesh.

He shrieked. The gun went off, deafening her.

T-Rex tried to shake her off. His skin was slimy. His blood tasted metallic and hot. His muscles and tendons strained against her teeth.

The gun went off again. She could no longer hear it. The explosion reverberated through their struggling bodies. He tried to angle the barrel to aim it at her skull. Jammed his fingers into the corners of her mouth. He was going to rip her jaw right off, but she couldn’t have let go if she wanted to. She was locked on, like a maddened pit bull.

She opened her eyes. The heel of Sean’s boot brushed past her face, slammed into T-Rex’s hand. Her jaw loosened as the blow jarred them against the wall. The gun bounced against the wall, hit the floor.

So did she.

T-Rex swung up his massive knee. Sean barely blocked the blow to his groin, and the vicious jab to the temple. So the dude wasn’t all gym-rat muscle and ego. He was scarily quick. The glow in his wild eyes suggested drug enhancement. Whatever the shit was, it worked.

The guy came at him, howling, in a blur of kicks and punches.

Blood splattered onto Sean with each new offensive, but T-Rex was feeling no pain. He herded Sean into a corner. A kick to his face knocked him off course, but he swung back, lunging for Sean’s throat.

Sean blocked, grabbed, twisted. T-Rex didn’t even feel the torqued tendons. Bad breath, he noted with odd detachment, as they careened toward the back of the cabin. Foul. Guy should floss. They swayed, legs splayed, trying to trip each other. Barrelling towards a warped door that led to the deck. They tore it off its rusty hinges and hit the deck with a rending crash. Panes of glass beneath them shattered, tinkled. Rotten planks shuddered and groaned, bowing at the impact.

Sean ended up on the bottom, as luck would have it.

T-Rex’s face was barely recognizable as human. Sean blocked a chopping blow to the collarbone. T-Rex got his enormous hands around Sean’s neck. It became a wrestling match. Sweat dripped from the guy’s brow, stinging Sean’s eyes. He kept his neck rigid, freeing his hand for a quick, desperate jab at T-Rex’s white-rimmed eyes.

T-Rex jerked back, and Sean jabbed in a sharp uppercut that rocked the bigger man’s head back on his thick neck. That broke his concentration, but Sean hadn’t even rolled up to his knees before TRex smashed him against the sagging deck railing. Planks cracked, bowed, and gave. Nails screeched as they were torn from their long home. The deck tipped. There was nothing solid to grab. He pitched over the edge.

It was a long fall, but the cliff was not sheer, and he bounced and slid over outcroppings of granite before landing on his feet, fortunately, bending at the knees. He rolled, came to rest facedown, his nose inches from crystalline water that lapped over the multicolored pebbles.

He scrambled up. T-Rex had not fallen with him. What was left of the deck dangled at a forty-five degree angle, planks scattered on the pebbled beach. T-Rex had glommed on to a tough shrub on the cliff face, and was pulling himself up onto the rocks where the cabin was perched.

Sean looked frantically around. He was trapped in a cove, rock on all sides, thorny foliage that would take ten desperate minutes to crawl through. T-Rex would be back up there in a couple of minutes. He pried his knife out. The angle sucked, but it was worth a try. He threw.

The knife embedded itself in the back of T-Rex’s ass.

The guy yelped, slid, caught himself. He reached back, and plucked the knife out of himself. “Thanks for the blade, you shit-eating prick. You’re going to love what I do to your girlfriend’s face with it.”

He stuck Sean’s blade between his teeth and kept climbing.

Sawing through plastic strapping that held one’s own wrists together required a cool head and steady hands, neither of which she had. T-Rex’s knife was wickedly sharp, and she kept nicking herself, or maybe worse than nicking. She could be slitting her own wrists. Not that she cared. Bleeding to death was the least of her worries right now.

She knelt on the doorstep, pressing her knee to the knife handle to hold the protruding blade steady enough to saw at the cuffs. Her thighs wobbled. Her fingers were slippery with blood. The knife kept slipping to one side or the other. She shook with desperate laughter. The first time in her life that she’d actually wished she were heavier.

She found a lucky angle. The thing snapped free. She dove back into the cabin without hesitating, scrambling for the guns.

Her head rang, she saw stars, and the silence in her gun blast-deafened ears felt blank, unnatural, as if she were underwater. She scrabbled over the dirty floor. The guns, the guns. She found Sean’s revolver beneath a fold of crumpled tarp. T-Rex’s gun she found under a pile of yellowed newspapers. She could only deal with one, so she shoved Sean’s into the back of her jeans, hoping she wouldn’t shoot herself in the butt, and clutched the other gun with shaking hands.

She might not even be able to use the thing, if it came down to it. She couldn’t seem to make her numb fingers contract.

“Hey there, babydoll.”

T-Rex’s oily croon sounded small and faraway, through the ringing in her ears. Liv brandished the gun, holding the sinking, fainting horror at bay with everything she had. Oh God. Sean.

T-Rex saw the wild shaking of the gun barrel. He licked heavy, shiny lips, and grinned. His face was a shining mask of blood, which made his eyes seem pale and wild, like a maddened animal.

He held a knife. It had to be Sean’s. Blood dripped from its tip.

He followed her horrified gaze, and started to laugh, waving it in the air. “Yeah, I had some fun with your boyfriend, before I slit his throat. Didn’t you hear him scream? Want to know what I did to him?”

“Get away from me.” Her own voice sounded farther away than his. A shaking wisp. “Don’t take one step closer. I’ll blow your head off.”

“Oh yeah? That’s a Beretta PX Storm, babydoll. That’s a man’s gun. It’ll break your little lily white fingers. It’s not for a pretty fuckable doll like you. Game over.”

He stepped in the cabin door. She found herself backing up. Big mistake. She could tell from the way his gloating smirk widened.

“I’m serious,” she quavered. “I’ll shoot you dead.”

“No you won’t. You’re a good little girl. You won’t give me any trouble. I bet you’ve never given anybody any trouble in your life.”

“I will.” She swallowed over rock in her throat. “I’m big trouble.”

His big bloody hands reached for her. “You don’t want me mad at you,” he murmured. “You want me to love you tender. Come to papa. I’ll make you forget your pretty blond boy.”

Mentioning Sean was his mistake. It broke his spell, like a bubble popping. Her arms swung up. She squeezed the trigger. Bam. She heard the sound, as if from miles away. The recoil flung her arms up, and she almost knocked herself right between the eyes with the heavy gun.