A Face at the Window (15 page)

And for the unopened packet of peanut butter crackers Helen had stashed there, emergency rations, no doubt, in case one of her young charges got hungry and cranky. Jake ate one of the crackers and drank some juice, put the rest on the passenger seat.

For later. Because there must be a way out of this, but it might not be fast. Or safe. The car might shift again, or—

A deep, rolling rumble came from outside and above the car, followed by a heavy drumming noise…
thunder.
And rain, heavy by the sound of it. Gingerly she touched the fractured windshield.

Wet.
She hadn't been paying any attention to the weather but the storms that had been looming out over the bay had approached just the same, and now they were here. She turned the flashlight on again, saw to her horror the trickles of water dripping steadily in through the crazed glass. Her chances of surviving this night had just dropped a lot, she realized bleakly, for in addition to water's other undesirable qualities-

It was cold and unbreathable, and in a massive downpour, why shouldn't the buried car just fill up?

—water was heavy. A pint is a pound, Bella Diamond would say. So waiting for morning no longer seemed practical, either. Outside, thunder rumbled and the rain fell harder; the trickles through the windshield freshened to torrents.

Don't panic.
But without wanting to she began wondering how many pints of water per minute were pouring into the pit, anyway, and about how long they might keep on pouring…

Her cell phone rang. Startled, she nearly screamed, scanning around wildly—oh, dear God, there it was, on the floor wedged up under the gas pedal somehow, she must've kicked it there…

"Hello? Whoever this is, I need help—"

"Jake?"

"Ellie! Oh, my God, Ellie, listen to me—"

"Jake? Are you there?" The connection was crystal clear, as if Ellie were right outside the car.

But she had to be in an airport somewhere, or in a plane on her way home. "Jake, what's happened? Is Lee okay? We got a call from Bob Arnold, I mean a message, but I don't understand, we've been calling and calling, and…"

Her voice faded; Jake found her own. "Ellie, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I don't know, everyone's trying to find her, but—"

A piece of gravel popped through the windshield and struck her cheek. "Ellie, I'm in trouble. I need you to call Bob and—"

"Jake?" Tinny and mechanical, now, Ellie's voice came back briefly. "Say it again, please, I can't…"

Fighting panic, Jake recited her location and asked Ellie to call Bob Arnold, tell him where she was and that she needed help right away. But she didn't know if Ellie heard, and the lighted bar display on the phone dropped to nothing before she finished.

She stared at it for a moment. Surely the battery couldn't be failing, not now on top of everything else. She pressed the Off button, tried to connect again as a massive boom of thunder shook the car, sending yet another heavy slide of gravel rattling and thudding. Then the center of the bulging windshield ruptured abruptly with a sound like cloth ripping, a fist-sized gout of stones poured in over the dashboard ledge, and the rest of the windshield sagged, beginning to tear away from the frame.

This is ridiculous,
she thought, her heart hammering;
things like this just don't happen to people.

But the gravel said otherwise. The gravel said it was coming in, now, so if there was anything she wanted to think about, any particularly bad deed she wished to say an act of contrition for, or some pleasant moment she wished to review…

Whatever it was, she'd better take care of it, that gravel said. Because it was coming in, ready or not.

The phone chirruped again. She snatched it up and gasped into it. "Ellie? I'm not kidding, you've got to—"

With a loud, wet
r-r-ri-iip!
the windshield tore in, letting an enormous wave of stones pour through. Scrambling sideways, she lost the phone and found it again.

"Can you hear me? Ellie, I'm in a—"

The gravel just kept coming, hissing and banging, piling up on the seat as if it would never stop.

But then it did stop. Or maybe just paused…"Ellie?" she whispered, pressed against the driver's-side door, staring at the ragged spot where one edge of the windshield was still attached to the frame.

Only…the edge was
moving,
slowly but surely separating from the windshield mount, bit by tiny—

"Ellie!"
No answer. Until…

"Hello, Jacobia," a man's voice said clearly.

Not from the phone. Slowly, she closed the instrument.

"Goodness, what a predicament," said Ozzie Campbell.

Right outside, only a few feet away.

Standing by the buried car. "Don't you hurt her. Don't you hurt that little girl, you son of a bitch," she shouted.

Knowing he could hear. That he was out there, laughing and waiting. "What do you
want
with her, you
psycho?"
she demanded.

But there was no answer, and there kept on not being one.

Minutes passed, then half an hour with no sound from him.

Longer. She held her breath; nothing. Maybe he was gone.

Maybe not.

When Anthony Colapietro
returned to Marky Larson's old blue Monte Carlo after muscling Helen Nevelson into the woods, first Marky wanted his gun back right away and then of course Anthony got stuck having to take care of the little kid in the backseat.

Luckily she was still hung over from the tincture of opium they'd given her, a pharmaceutical mixture that Marky had
scored from a guy he knew who worked in a drugstore.
Do not kill the kid,
the guy who'd hired them had told Marky very seriously, and Marky had conveyed this instruction to Anthony, as well.

Thus Anthony had been careful, dosing more of the brown, licorice-smelling stuff out in stages while the baby-sitter was still out cold, until the kid conked out, too. So when they got back to the hideout—

That was how he'd begun thinking of the big house in the woods, as a hideout, and himself as a sort of custodian of it and of this whole situation—

The kid was awake, sitting up. "Mommy?" she said, and then louder: "Mommy!"

A lot louder, and sounding pretty ticked off. Marky glowered into the rearview at the kid, then at Anthony. "Yo, do something about her, would ya? I'm tryna’ drive, here, for freak's sake."

"Yeah, okay," said Anthony. If Marky hadn't taken the kid's rag doll and pitched it, maybe Anthony would have a better chance of quieting her down. But Marky would never think of something like that. Let Anthony handle it, was Marky's strategy, and if it doesn't go right, bitch Anthony out so you can feel better. That was Marky's whole plan, as far as Anthony could see.

Still, this was no time to complain. Get back home, get his money, after that maybe Anthony could develop his own inkling of what to do next. A new angle; heavy-equipment theft, maybe. That no-key-needed thing sounded good. Or maybe just plain old theft.

Robbery, even. Because he wasn't afraid of guns. He just had the idea that he might like choosing his own target for a change. And it had already occurred to him that he might need to, because Marky had started eyeing him as soon as he got back to
the car, after dragging the girl into the woods. To see, Anthony supposed, whether killing somebody had taken the piss out of him.

Which it hadn't, but not for the reason that Marky thought. It was because Anthony had put a pair of bullets into a tree trunk instead of the girl's head.

Heck, the shape she was in, she probably wouldn't make it out of the woods anyway. And even if she did, they'd be long gone by the time she emerged. She'd seen their faces but not the plate on the Monte; Anthony had muddied it up before they grabbed her, cleaned it off again afterward so as not to get pulled over by some random cop who happened to pass.

Better make sure, Marky had probably been thinking. But he'd also been thinking about something else, Anthony knew: that pulling the trigger on the girl was the he-who. That's what they called it in the juvie home, as in, he who did the deed took the punishment.

Like for instance if a kid there just suddenly snapped and beat another kid nearly to death with a metal chair leg, even if the other kid started it by saying the first kid's mother wasn't really dead. That she'd dumped him in the home, didn't even try to get him off the bogus burglary charge he was here for, ‘cause she was sick of him, sick of his stupid face.

That she was a doper and hooker who'd run off with some man and wasn't coming back, and
that's
why she never visited him. He wasn't orphaned, he was abandoned, the soon-to-be-beat-up kid had gone on
nyah-nyahing
tauntingly at Anthony. That he tried to act so tough, but everyone knew his mom had kept him locked in a—

Quit it,
Anthony told himself, yanking his mind back to the important thing: that he who pulled the trigger got prison time, maybe even a needle. He didn't know whether Maine had capital
punishment, but whatever they had, he knew he wouldn't like it.

So screw Marky, Anthony thought rebelliously again as he leaned over the backseat. Marky thought he had all the angles figured. But what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him. "Hey, kid," Anthony said, putting his hand out to the little girl as Marky pulled the car up to the house in the woods.

No lights, but they'd left it that way on purpose. Anthony had finally gone down into the cellar and solved the electricity mystery by flipping a half dozen circuit switches and pressing a button marked On. The power in the house, he had gathered from the markings and instructions on the equipment down there, came from solar panels.

In other words, from the sun. He'd seen this before, when he was out with the working stiffs, so it wasn't even a new concept for him. The collection panels were outside somewhere; the cellar room held a wall-mounted control box with digital readouts on it, an exhaust fan that went on when he pressed the On button, and a dozen golf-cart-sized storage batteries.

"Took you long enough," had been Marky's only comment when Anthony got back upstairs. "So where's the coffee?"

As if somehow Anthony was in charge of keeping Marky fed and comfortable. Like he was running this hotel.

But to his surprise Anthony had found he didn't mind that assumption; for one thing, anything he did to keep Marky happy he could also do for himself.

Besides…well, he wasn't sure exactly what else he didn't mind. Being in charge of this kind of nuts-and-bolts thing might help him, that was all, somewhere down the road.

"Hey," he repeated now to the kid in the backseat, as Marky got out and strode away. She seemed unharmed by the tincture of opium he'd given her, forcing her to drink the first big dose
but putting the rest in a juice box he'd grabbed in the house that they'd taken her from, a few hours earlier.

Marky had pooh-poohed it in his usual sarcastic, you-idiot way, but Anthony remembered from the juvie home how children had to be tricked into taking medicine. Now the kid eyed Anthony's hand mistrustfully but didn't start howling or anything.

And that was good. That was progress. Maybe this whole I'm-in-charge-of-the-kid thing wouldn't be so bad. Keep Marky out of his hair, anyway. Marky hated kids.

Anthony tried touching her on the chin, maybe get her to smile a little. But instead with a lightning-fast move she ducked her head and sank her teeth into Anthony's knuckle.

"Ow! Hey, let go, you little—"

Anthony yanked his hand back, trying to get his finger out of the kid's mouth. But she wouldn't give it up.

"Ow, ow, ow!" Halfway over the seat, he grabbed the straps of her overalls, trying to pull her off him. But the harder he pulled, the harder she bit.

Marky yanked the back door open and the dome light went on. "Hey, what're you, tryin'a’ wake up the freakin’ dead out here?"

Then he saw what the problem was. "Oh, jeeze. You're lucky she didn't getcha by the balls, you stupid punk. Here, lemme."

Marky reached into the car, conveying by his manner that he knew just how to handle this. Anthony thought right then that the kid was history, and never mind what the guy who hired them might say about it. But instead of making quick work of her as Anthony expected, Marky just grabbed her by the nose, squeezing it.

"Here, ya brat, how d'ya like this, huh? You like this, a little a’ your own medicine?"

The kid's eyes widened and her mouth dropped open abruptly. Anthony yanked his finger out and put his bleeding knuckle into his own mouth, tasting licorice-flavored orange juice. "Jeeze," he mumbled around it.

Marky glared scathingly at him. "You're useless, you know? Freakin’ useless." He walked toward the house.

"Now get the kid outta there," he called over his shoulder. "Get her inside, then find us some freakin’ food. I'm starvin,’ for freak's sake."

Helen woke up
hurting. Her head, her jaw. Her throat raw and aching. Everything just hurt so bad.

And scared. Oh, Jesus God so scared. But alive.…

Alive. The guy had shot her, held the gun to her head and shot her, and that was the last thing Helen Nevelson remembered.

The only thing, really. Dying. But now…

The rest all came back in an awful rush, being at the house, them showing up, getting shoved roughly into the car, and—

Lee.
What had they done with her? Helen began to cry, tiny whimpers that hurt worse than anything she'd ever felt before. Curled in a ball on the cold, wet ground, her hands tied before her, she lay in the darkness where she'd fallen and wept for the baby she'd been supposed to safeguard.

And for herself, because it hurt so much.
Please. Please, somebody come and help me.…

But nobody did, and after a long time, when it sank in that no one was going to, she stopped. Cold, it was so cold here…

And wet. Mist dripped from the trees, soaking her. Chills rattled through her bones, her teeth chattering hard, muscles spasming with agony. And her head…

"Oh," she groaned, shifting slightly to get her weight off her leg, cramped beneath her. A bolt of pain shot cruelly through it, but she sat up anyway.