Pyramid Lake (52 page)

But my hands were tied.
Amy
was inside the RV, too.

I angled the jeep toward the front of the RV, where she was least likely to be. A hundred feet from it, I took my foot off the gas and slid my mouth guard in.

The jeep hit at around thirty miles per hour, crumpling the RV’s engine compartment and shattering the expansive windshield. Unbuckling my seat belt, I launched myself out of the driver’s seat and scrambled over onto the jeep’s hood, drawing my gun. Holding it in a two-handed grip, keeping the barrel elevated above Amy’s head height, I kicked in the shattered safety glass of the RV’s windshield and plunged into the cockpit.

I hurtled through the empty kitchen and dinette… and came to a sudden stop.

Doug Hensley lay sprawled on the floor between the dinette and the bathroom, staring up at me out of two empty, gore-filled sockets. The teardrop tattoos alongside one of the holes were smeared crimson.

Feeling my stomach contract, I stared in shock.

How had little Amy managed to do
that
to him?

Then I noticed the pale cauliflower lumps that thickened the puddle of blood beneath his head. The back of Doug’s skull had been blown open. Someone had shot out both of his eyes, using hollow-point bullets. My gaze rose to take in the two side-by-side splotches of blood and brain matter clumped on the wall at head height.

I could almost see a ghostly Doug standing before me, slack-jawed, his eyes disappearing one after the other, as the hamburger-size splotches bloomed on the wall behind his head like Mickey Mouse ears.
Bam—bam.
The shooter had drilled both Doug’s eyes dead center where he stood, the second shot following the first so quickly that Doug’s body hadn’t even started to drop yet.

My daughter couldn’t have done this. But whoever had was one hell of a shot.

A thump came from the back of the RV. The bedroom.

Hopping over Doug’s sprawled legs, I kicked aside the stepstool that had been braced under the handle, and yanked the door open.

Lying on the bedcovers, Amy stared at me with terrified eyes. Her arms and legs were tied with duct tape. The sight of her sent a serrated saw blade through my heart.

My little girl looked so scared.

Dropping to my knees beside the bed, I tossed the gun aside. I pulled my daughter to my chest and hugged her, and my knees started drumming against the bedframe. I was shaking so hard that the frantic questions pouring from my mouth dissolved into an incomprehensible stutter of heaving syllables.

Amy burst into tears, too.

“Daddy, please don’t cry,” she sobbed. “Nothing bad happened to me. I’m all right.”

T
he paramedics, moving with urgency, slid the gurney out of the back of the ambulance. As they pushed through the sliding glass doors of Renown Regional Med Center’s emergency department, I slid out from behind the other parked ambulance and slung the strap of a bulky red trauma bag over one shoulder. Matching my rapid, deliberate pace to theirs, I jogged through the glass doors a few feet behind their gurney.

My bright neon-yellow EMT jacket with its strips of reflective tape matched what the other paramedics wore. So did my dark baseball cap. I’d found both, along with the oversize trauma bag, in the back of the parked ambulance.

Hospital staff made way for all three of us as we passed them. The attention of the two paramedics stayed focused on the patient on the gurney they were navigating through the corridor ahead. They never looked back. I followed them through a couple turns, keeping my head lowered as I scanned each corridor intersection we passed from beneath the bill of my cap.

Spotting what I needed, I ducked down a side corridor and listened as the bustle of my fellow paramedics receded into the distance. Then I slipped into the single-sink bathroom, locked the door behind me, and gently lowered the sixty-pound trauma bag to the tile floor.

Ignoring the rolls of gauze, compresses, ice packs, syringes, and scissors bulging from its exterior pockets, I unzipped the spacious main compartment and helped Amy climb out.

“Don’t open this door for anyone else,” I said, and she nodded. I stepped back into the hall and waited until I heard Amy twist the lock behind me. Then I hurried away.

Standing in the busy hospital cafeteria line, I leaned past a tired-looking surgeon in scrubs to grab a yogurt, but I overbalanced. Brushing against him as I steadied myself, I mumbled an apology, then crossed to the other side, yogurt in hand, to where the hot entrees were. Checking what was being served, I shook my head, put the yogurt down, and left.

The door to the staff changing room around the corner was locked. Reaching into my jacket pocket, I pulled out the badge I had plucked off the tired doctor in the cafeteria, held it up to the magnetic reader to disengage the lock, and pushed inside. I stripped off the EMT jacket, turned it inside out to hide the bright yellow, and jammed it deep into a cart of dirty linen. Then I found a set of pale blue scrubs, tops and bottoms, and pulled those on. A white surgical mask over my nose and mouth completed the ensemble.

The rolling linen hamper was a triangular lidded frame of stainless steel tubing on wheels, supporting a large drawstring bag. I dumped the hamper’s contents and tossed in a bunch of clean scrubs. Then I pushed it out the door.

Seven minutes later and five stories up, I rolled the now much heavier hamper through Trauma ICU. Passing the nurses station, I checked the dry-erase whiteboard on the wall, noting the room number next to my wife’s name. I continued down the corridor, coughing loudly and continuously, trying to make the hacking coughs sound as wet and phlegmy as I could.

Staff turned their heads away instinctively, averting their eyes as I went by.

The guard stationed halfway down the hall stepped back a pace as I rolled the cart past him with an especially explosive cough. I opened the door to Jen’s hospital room, pushed the cart inside, and closed the door.

Monitors and carts surrounded the Stryker bed where my ex-wife lay. Three IV stands with electronic pumps supported a half-dozen dangling bags of clear fluid. Both Jen’s arms were resting on top of the covers. A thick bundle of IV lines disappeared under the swaths of medical tape that wrapped her left forearm from wrist to elbow. Swollen fingertips projected from the gauze that wrapped her hand. Even beneath the tape I could see the purple blotches of bruising on her arms.

Sorrow blanketed my chest and made my eyes sting.

Blond curls stuck out from the layers of bloodstained gauze that wrapped her head. An oxygen mask covered her nose and mouth. Her face was bruised, too—the orbits of her closed eyes blackened, her cheekbone swollen on one side. A thick gauze pad wrapped her chest, which rose and fell in shallow breaths.

According to the notation on the whiteboard above the nurse’s station, Jen had come out of surgery two hours ago. They had repaired a lung puncture and taken out her ruptured spleen.

Seeing what I had done to my wife stabbed me through the heart. I wanted to take her place somehow, to change things so that I was the one hurt instead of her, and she was all right again. But I couldn’t undo this, no matter how badly I wanted to.

I yanked my surgical mask down to hang around my neck, then raised the lid of the rolling linen hamper and lifted Amy out. She joined me at the side of the bed, her eyes brimming.

I took my ex-wife’s uninjured hand in mine.

“Jen,” I whispered. “Amy’s here.”

Jen’s eyes opened, focused on me for a moment. Then they shifted to her daughter beside me and widened. She shook her fingers out of mine and groped for Amy’s hand. Clutching it with desperate force, she tried to speak through the oxygen mask. Then she closed her eyes, and the bed shook as silent tears of relief streamed down her face.

Amy was crying too. “Daddy came and got me,” she said. “Just like I
knew
he would. I wasn’t scared, Mom. I wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry, Jen. We can’t stay,” I whispered. “I knew you needed to see with your own eyes that Amy was okay. But now I’ve got to hide her somewhere safe.”

Jen’s eyes snapped open to stare at me, and the bleakness in them shredded my gut. Whatever Frankenstein had showed her had convinced her that Amy was dead. Or worse. It had hurt Jen far worse than the car accident had.

And now I was telling her it wasn’t over yet.

“Forgive me,” I gasped, dropping to my knees at her bedside. I curled over until my forehead pressed against the edge of the mattress. I couldn’t look the woman I loved in the face anymore.

I was terrified I would see that she hated me.

“I’m so, so sorry, Jen,” I choked out. “Forgive me, and I swear I’ll go away and never come back. Because what happened to you… what happened to Amy… this is all my fault. All of it.”

My chest tightened and I couldn’t breathe any more, couldn’t look at my family. All I could do was try not to shatter.

Jen’s body shifted a little, and I heard a slight sucking noise as she pulled the oxygen mask away from her face. Then her fingers caressed my scalp. She gently stroked the side of my cheek.

“Of course it’s your fault, Trevor,” she whispered. “It always was.”

“I’m going to take care of this,” I said. “I’m going to punish the ones responsible. They’ll never endanger you or Amy or anyone else again.”

“I thought I had lost her,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you, too. Don’t do this. There are lines you shouldn’t cross. Once you do, there is no turning back.”

Jen’s fingers slid from my cheek as I stood.

“They took our daughter,” I said. “They hurt the people I love. There are no lines. Not anymore.”

“H
e knows everybody
we
know,” Amy said. “He got the address books off your and Jen’s phones, Dad. Call and text histories, too.” She hesitated. “I think he even friended me on Facebook.”

“
Motherf
—” my fists tightened on the wheel, and I took a deep breath. “When?” I asked.

“About a week ago,” she said.

A week ago was when I first hooked up the Trevornet. I had given Frankenstein Internet access and he had immediately used it to stalk my daughter.

“What did he want?” I asked.

“
She,
” Amy said. “
Francesca.
She was tweeting stuff about American Girl dolls—she knew lots of things about them nobody else does. She said her dad works at the factory, and she gave me a coupon code for Meatloaf, because she already
had
a Meatloaf—”

“There’s an American Girl doll called Meatloaf?” I asked. “What is she, morbidly obese?”

Amy rolled her eyes. Then she laughed at my joke, and my heart melted with relief.

Steering the Camry, I turned my head to check the mirrors for anyone following—and to keep my daughter from seeing what was happening on my face. This was the first smile I had seen from Amy since I found her tied up in Hensley’s trailer.

It told me our baby was going to be okay.

“Meatloaf’s a pet bulldog, not a girl,” she said, still giggling. “You’re being silly on purpose.”

I had borrowed our nondescript car around the corner from the hospital, in the parking lot outside Suzy’s Adult Superstore. On our way through the hospital’s parking structure, we had passed plenty of cars we could have taken. But it would have been wrong to inconvenience someone visiting a sick or injured relative. They had enough problems to deal with already.

Amy was silent as we crossed the bridge over the Truckee River.

“Daddy...?” she asked. The guilt in her voice made me slow the Camry and pull over on the side of the road. I climbed over the seat back to hug her, and she started bawling.

“Sh-h-h,” I said. “Everything’s fine now.”

“You told Jen it was all
your
fault,” she sobbed. “But it isn’t, Daddy. It’s
mine
. Francesca told me she was having problems in school and seeing a psychiatrist, too. That story about the yard duty killing people? It was
her
idea, not mine. I’m sorry. I was so stupid. I caused so many problems, and now Jen’s in the hospital because of me.”

“You couldn’t know what would happen,” I said. “But
I
should have. Now I need your help to fix my mistake, Amy. Where will you be safe?”

“He can lie to
anyone,
Daddy.” She dried her tears on my shirt, and pulled away, her face thoughtful. “He can call all the day cares and shelters at the same time to find me. Even a police station won’t work. The man who brought the phone onto the plane so I could talk to you while he took me away? He was a
policeman.
”

“Think, Amy,” I said. “There’s got to be
someone
around here you’ll be safe with for a couple days. Someone who Frankenstein would never guess I might leave you with.”

“But everyone you know was in your phone,” she said. “Or he knows about them because he heard you talking to them. Could he see out of the phone’s camera?”

I nodded. “Probably.”

“You don’t know even
one single person
around here whose information wasn’t on your phone?” she asked. “A person Frankenstein would
never
guess that you might leave me with?”

I thought about her question for a minute. Then I closed my eyes and hugged my daughter tight.

“You’re way smarter than your dad, Ames. There
is
someone like that. But first, there’s another mistake I made, which I need to fix.”

• • •

Holding the driver’s license to check the address again, I looked at the house as we drove by. Raymond Cullinan’s shiny, spotless blue pickup truck was in his driveway, the Dora and Hello Kitty stickers still visible on its window. A two-wheeled minitrailer was hitched behind his truck, holding a rolled-up bouncy house. The signage on the trailer advertised “Ray’s Astro Entertainment.”

Several more party rentals—deflated jumpy houses and waterslides—were lined up alongside Ray’s garage, rolled up like giant, colorful burritos. Over the side fence, I could see the peaked green roof of a jumpy house that he had inflated and left permanently in his backyard. “Princess Kelly’s Castle” was silk-screened across the top.