Primary Storm (30 page)

Just a plain stone staircase, hugging the far wall, heading upstairs. No banister. Just plain cut stone. Not much to work with there. There was also no handy-dandy workbench, with saws, files, or other sharp tools hanging down for easy access. Nothing. I moved my head. Three walls, all with the framed shelves for holding pricey bottles of wine. And from what I could tell, each shelf was empty. Just me and the stone and the dirt and the staircase and the shelves, and the two tiny windows.

My heart rate eased some, as did my breathing. Time to get back to moving.

Stretch, constrict, stretch, constrict, and as I moved, I saw the pieces of what had happened slide into place. The shooting at the Tyler Conference Center. I was to have been the patsy, the nutty former lover, trying to kill the senator's wife. But the bullets missed and I'd got sick, and that story didn't pan out. Then there was Spenser Harris, the faux Secret Service agent. Killed and dumped in my yard to do what ... make me lash out? Make me run to Barbara Hale for another setup?

Who knew.

But I did know one thing. I had to move faster.

Stretch, constrict, stretch, constrict. Something in my coat pocket was pushing against the small of my back, hurting it like hell, but it wasn't going to stop me.

More movement. Now I was hungry, too, and thirsty. Stretch, constrict, stretch, constrict.

And I still hurt like hell.

Stopped for a moment. Almost there. Looked up at the windows. There was light now coming in, strong light, fresh light.

It was Monday morning, a day before the fine citizens of this state would help choose the next president.

I shook my head and kept moving, and then, when my bound hands touched the smooth wood of the wine shelves, I stopped and took another long break, breathing hard, head throbbing and aching. A long, hard slog. A very long, hard slog.

And not over yet. Not by a long shot.

I moved my fingers about, searching for a piece of sharp wood, a protruding nail, or even a bit of metal framework, anything that could cut through the necktie holding my arms still.

Nothing.

Just smooth wood and stone.

I moved to the left, my bound hands still underneath the bottom shelf of the empty wine rack. Moved along, moved along, still feeling nothing but smooth rock and stone. From overhead, there were heavy footsteps up on the foyer floor. Up there, movement, up there, people at work, planning and plotting, waiting for me to fulfill my role.

The hell I would.

Now I was at the end of the shelves. Nothing. I looked back to where I had started. About halfway back across the room. Another section of the shelves remained. I took a breath, started inching back like one bruised and tired inchworm. Back to the shelves, moving along, my hands searching and poking, probing, feeling along and-

Something sharp.

Something sharp bit at my hand. I froze.

Didn't dare move, just waited.

Moved my hand again. Whatever was there had moved. Closed my eyes. Took a breath. Moved my hand again ... Nothing.

Upstairs, more footsteps, the murmur of conversation. I moved my hand. Still nothing.

I wiggled around, shoved my hand under the shelf, grunting in the process, scraped some skin off my wrist and ---

Sharpness again.

My fingers were numb, tingling with lack of circulation, but I held or to whatever was there.

I moved forward, my hand tight against the sharpness, and I felt it and I thought I smiled, there in the darkness.

A piece of glass. Part of a broken wine bottle.

For this had been a wine cellar for quite a number of years, and I had a thought, a prayer, really, that somewhere along the line, a bottle would have been dropped, would have broken, and a piece of glass would have been overlooked as whoever had done the dropping would have had done a sloppy job in cleaning up.

I felt along the piece of glass. A sharp edge. I moved back against the shelf, lodged the glass against the wood, and started moving my bound wrists against the glass. Up and down, up and down, and ---

The glass slipped.

Cut against my right wrist.

"Shit," I said, feeling the glass drop, feeling my wrist burn with the cut, now replaced with warmness as the blood started trickling down.

Reached and groped and got the glass.

Back again, cut and cut, and I felt the fabric of my necktie start to fray and break away. More cutting, more cutting, and I started moving my wrists and ---

Everything tore away.

My wrists were free. Freedom.

I was free.

I rubbed and rubbed my wrists, the blood roaring back into my fingers, tingling and tingling, more rubbing.

I leaned forward, started working on the leather belt around my ankles, my fingers numb and my wrist bleeding, and I tore a fingernail or two getting it off, but off it was, and I stretched my legs and rubbed out the cramps, rubbed some more, and yes, I was free ...

I looked up at the staircase, the locked door, the two tiny windows.

Some freedom.

Chapter Seventeen

I went through my pockets, wanting to find out what in hell had been poking at me, and I felt a small square of plastic and metal, and I pulled it out, and almost shouted with glee at what was there.

My hardly used cell phone, tiny and overlooked.

I pulled up the tiny antenna, switched it on, and started punching in the number of the Tyler Police Department. Diane would help me, Diane would know what to do, and-

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Looked at the tiny display screen.

In tiny little letters that felt twelve feet tall. NO SERVICE.

Of course. Why should anything be easy?

I stood up, swaying, almost fell down again. Stretched and gasped as cramps rippled through my legs, and then I moved, rubbed again. I went up to the stone staircase, gently moved up along the steps, trying to keep the noise down, until I reached the top. Just for the hell of it, I moved my hands along the wall. No light switch. And I tried the doorknob. Locked, of course.

Cell phone in hand, I tried again.

The phone flickered into life, swinging between SERVICE and NO SERVICE. Close ... so very close.

I looked around the cellar, saw the light streaming in through the two small windows.

Maybe ... just maybe.

I quietly went down the stone steps, almost fell as another series of cramps went running through my legs, and I went over to the shelves, looked up. About eleven, twelve feet. A hell of a thing. Blood was still trickling down my right wrist and I made a sloppy bandage with my handkerchief.

And then I started climbing.

The wood had sharp edges against my hands, and I winced as I made my way up, the shelves groaning under my weight. About halfway, my foot broke through one of the slats, making a loud crack that I was sure could be heard as far away as Porter, and I murmured another series of expletives when the cell phone dropped from my hand. I looked down in the dim light and almost passed out when I saw the piece of metal and plastic split apart when it hit the stone floor.

I made my way slowly down to the floor, went and gathered up the pieces, and went to the center of the cellar, where the light was best. I put it back together as best as I could, and then went back to the wine rack, putting the cell phone back into my coat. Something must have loosened from my previous attempt, for the wood groaned and I felt the shelves move away from the wall.

"Close," I whispered. "So damn close."

I moved back up the shelving, taking it slow, knowing that by going slow, I wouldn't slip but was leaving open the chance of the damn thing collapsing under my weight, and I let that cheery debate run itself out as I got higher and higher, right up to the top, right by one of the two windows. The window was built into the stone foundation and couldn't be opened, and in any event, it was too small to crawl through ... but what I wanted to get through the window wasn't made of proteins. It was made of protons. Or something similar. My grasp on science right at that moment was pretty damn fuzzy.

Hanging on with one hand, I got the phone out of my coat, pulled the antenna out with my teeth, and held it up to the window, pressed the keypad.

There. I'll be damned.

SERVICE.

But another message was blinking at me. LOW BATTERY.

I guess my phone was one of those newfangled ones, for there was a digital countdown letting me know exactly how many seconds of usable power I had left, and I saw the number thirty become the number twenty-nine, become the number twenty-eight ...

Who to call?

Back in my coat pocket again, looking and finding ... a slip of paper in my hand, up to the window and the light, and there, the one call I would make. A call to warn her, a call to let her know, to go into hiding, to prevent her husband's defeat tomorrow, to call the Secret Service and do what had to be done ...

I punched in the numbers and waited, imagining the little digits running their way back to zero, and from upstairs, I heard a phone ringing. What a coincidence.

An odd counterpoint, this phone ringing, the upstairs phone ringing ---

A
click
. It was answered. A hesitant voice. "Hello?"

"Barbara?"

And everything got quite cold, as I realized the phone upstairs had, had . . .

Had stopped ringing. "Lewis? Is that you?"

And in the background, a very familiar voice, one I had heard the day before, as he was thumping me with a stun gun.

"Here? The sumbitch phoned you here?"

She hung up. I looked at my phone, now dead, and let it gently fallout of my hand and drop to the floor.

I slowly and carefully made my way back down to the stone floor, and feeling like the floor itself was being carried on my shoulders, I went over to the bottom of the stairs and looked up at the closed door.

And waited.

I didn't have to wait long.

The door opened and the lights came on, blinding me for a moment. I raised up a sore and bloody hand to my eyes to shield them. Harmon Jewett yelled down, "You wanna come up here, boy?"

"Do I have a choice?"

He laughed and a woman murmured behind him, and then he came down the stone steps, smiling widely, holding out the stun gun in his hand. Behind him was someone dear and familiar, and with each step she took downstairs, she broke my heart again and again. For a moment I was that college-aged boy, wondering and wondering why she had left me and had never called or written.

"Barbara," I said.

"Lewis."

She came down to the bottom of the steps and was now standing close to Harmon, standing right close to him, and with her arm through his, her head lowered. I flashed back to what I had seen, what I had remembered, about her and Jackson Hale. Over the past several days I had seen numerous videos of Barbara with her husband-candidate, and in each video-save one-she had been the devoted spouse, standing right next to the senator, smiling with him, laughing with him, applauding at each appropriate applause line. In each and every video, save one.

The one from the Tyler Conference Center.

And in that snippet of history, I remembered seeing Barbara with her husband, standing apart from her husband, standing very far apart from her husband ...

... because she knew.

She knew gunshots were going to be fired. She knew.

She always knew.

Harmon said, "Hands where I can see 'em, boy."

I held my hands out, and Harmon chuckled. "Glad to see you're bleeding. Helps everything else as well."

I ignored him, stared at the woman I had once loved so long ago, and before me ... before me was a stranger.

I said, "I guess first lady wasn't that attractive to you, was it."

Her head snapped right up and the sharpness of her eyes and her tone chilled me. "When did I ever have a choice? When did I ever have the right to say no? When did I ever have a voice in what was going on? When? It was all assumed. It was all planned. And if I hated being a senator's wife, being first lady to this nation of clowns was going to kill me. Was going to absolutely kill me ... "

"And killing your husband was going to change things?"

Harmon said, "Not kill 'em. Just wound him. Except that damn Spenny couldn't hit the broad side of a barn ... and our planned patsy was busy pukin' his guts instead of being inside the building and takin' the fall. So instead of a wounded candidate and a scandal over his wife's former lover, we got a bump in the fuckin' polls, if you can believe it."

Now I looked to Harmon. "This is what you do when you're marginalized, when Jackson Hale won't fire you? When he keeps you on his payroll?"