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I didn’t have to tell Susan not to approach the house in the car. My hands were trembling as I got out. Susan’s breath in the night air was misting gold under one of few streetlamps lining the woods.
“We call Clay,” Susan said. “We call in everyone we can.”
“I can try,” I said. I dialed and started walking. Susan was right by my side, unquestioning of my decision to head toward the inn on foot without waiting for backup.
We couldn’t rely on help coming our way. If we were going to help Nick, we’d have to do it ourselves.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
IT SEEMED EVERY light in the inn was on. Susan and I had come through the woods and along the narrow beach to the property, hoping to shelter from sight by the cars parked along the tree line. We crouched by the bumper of Vinny’s sedan and watched the house for movement, but there was none. Blinds were drawn on the lower floors, and the porch doors were hanging open, being pushed back and forth gently in the breeze. I looked over at the open doors of the garage and counted cars along with those parked at the tree line. Angelica, Clay, and Effie all had cars missing from the lot, as well as April Leeler and her son, whose bronze van had been parked at the end of the garage. Neddy Ives didn’t own a vehicle. Aside from Vinny’s sedan and Nick’s car, there was only one other car in the lot; a sleek black car parked right by the edge of the porch.
It took me a moment to recognize the rental.
“Karli Breecher,” I said. Susan looked grave but nodded. Herinstincts were as good as if not better than mine, and to her, too, it all made sense. Which meant that Breecher was either inside the house with Nick and in danger from the four “bad guys” Effie had mentioned…
Or she was one of the bad guys.
It’s a hell of a thing to sneak into your own home. To try to be silent, and watchful and alert for danger, while at every step, signs of violence present themselves. There was glass on the pavement outside the laundry window. The frame bashed and shattered, muddy footprints on the windowsill. The mind wants to respond to each sign of defilement with a singular burst of rage. That someone would breakmywindow. That someone would knock overmyshelves. By the time Susan and I reached the hall, it was clear that someone had been injured and had fled—perhaps through the kitchen door. There were blood spatters, dark and heavy, on the floorboards. Smears on the walls. The kitchen was trashed. We stood and listened at the kitchen doorway, systematically discounting each individual chime of the strange music the house always played. Pipes creaking. Roof beams relaxing out of the warmth of the day, and the branches of those trees that could reach the house brushing against the weatherboards. Susan touched my wrist, and I met her questioning eyes. She and I seemed to understand simultaneously how bad this was, the silence. There were supposed to be at least five people here.
I slipped into the dining room and covered my mouth with my hand to stifle a shocked groan at the sight of Vinny slumped back in his wheelchair, a bullet in his head. His color told me he was dead, but I went to him anyway, put a finger into his cooling jugular and felt nothing. Someone had been lying, bleedingbadly, by the foot of an armchair. Susan appeared in the doorway, her face a sickly shade of gray even before she’d taken in the sight of Vinny in the chair.
She had to gulp a couple of times to get the words out.
“Two dead in the dining room,” she whispered.
I had the same kind of trouble getting the words out, myself.
“Is it Nick?”
She shook her head. “Don’t know them. Driver’s guys, looks like.”
“Breecher was here,” I said, my mind racing. “And Driver. At the same time.”
Susan and I stared at each other, each trying to understand. I didn’t like the coincidental nature of it, the idea that Driver and his men might have been waiting in the forest for something to draw Effie’s attention away from her watchpoint, and that very thing arriving conveniently in the form of Karli Breecher.
I didn’t have time to think longer on that awful scenario, to try to fit the pieces together, before my life nearly ended then and there—in the doorway of the dining room in my own home, my girlfriend looking at me, my possessions and my world in tatters. But the bullet Driver fired from the end of the hall only nicked my left ear. The pain came afterward. Before I had a sense of what was happening, I was thrown sideways into the wall, the whole side of my head throbbing like I’d been punched.
Susan ducked instinctively, turned and whipped out her own gun. Two more shots peppered into the floorboards at my feet. Susan fired a couple of shots at Driver as he disappeared around a corner, heading for the stairwell.
We pursued.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
SUSAN PAUSED WITH me at the base of the stairs. I heard signs of life in the house for the first time since we had arrived. I was surprised at Driver’s stealth for his stockiness. As he retreated upstairs, I heard a floorboard or two creak. A piece of furniture moved slightly on a rug, pushed aside. Susan and I waited, silently plotting, trying to breathe through the adrenaline spike that the quick gunfight had inspired in both of us.
The stairwell was the most dangerous way for us to get upstairs. All Driver had to do was turn the corner and shoot down at us. We would have no cover whatsoever. Susan stepped close to me, her breath hot and damp on my face.
“We need to draw him away from the top of the stairs,” she said. “You go back out through the laundry, climb the drainpipe, and get in through one of the upstairs rooms. Draw him to you, and I’ll come up behind him.”
“He’ll see a move like that coming a mile away,” I said andshook my head. “If he hears a noise up there in one of the rooms, he’ll be sure it’s me.”
“Not if he thinks we’re both still down here,” Susan said. She pointed, and I peeked carefully around the corner of the stairwell. I could just see the tip of Driver’s shoe at the edge of the baseboard. It moved, and I looked up in time to see him duck back around the corner, having taken a moment to do the same thing—trying to catch a glimpse of the enemy.
I slipped my shoe off and crouched, positioning the toe of the shoe at the very edge of the baseboard so that it was visible to Driver from his position at the top of the stairs. As I backed away, Susan dashed across the bottom of the stairs. Two pops arrived from upstairs, the bullets puncturing the wall beside us, narrowly missing her as she arrived on the other side of the doorway. I heard the boards creek upstairs again as Driver leaned out to see if he’d hit her. Susan glanced at me and smiled, nodding.
For all Driver knew, we were both still positioned at the edges of the doorway at the bottom of the stairs.
I crept back through the eerily silent house to the laundry and slipped out the door into the night.
