Blood Trust (13 page)

“There’s a fine spot for them to find you.” His rising excitement turned his voice guttural. “Curled in the fireplace with the soot and the ash.”

“When people talk, their attention wavers,”
Jack had told her, and, as usual, he was right. Even as Rudy was mocking her, she lowered the shovel as if it had become too heavy for her, and swung it hard into the side of his left knee.

He groaned as the joint crumpled and he lost his footing. The poker fell to the floor as he grabbed his knee in agony. Alli tossed aside the shovel and ran. As she passed him, she kicked him in the side of the head. Then she leapt over him and, sprinting across the study, threw open the door, and raced out into the hallway.

Behind her, she could hear Rudy cursing, climbing noisily to his feet, then shouting to his fellow guards, alerting them to her escape. One of them appeared in the hallway ahead of her. He drew his sidearm and she backed up, turned, and heading back, raced around a corner, taking the first branching that presented itself.

She knew the layout of her uncle’s house well, though she hadn’t been in it for years. Now she headed for the kitchen, which had both a back door and a large larder with a trapdoor down to the root cellar, which Uncle Hank had converted into a temperature-controlled wine cellar.

She could hear the heavy tramp of thick brogues pounding behind her, and Rudy’s voice bellowing like that of a maddened bull. By her count, there were three guards. She knew, more or less, where two of them were, but where was the third?

She got her answer a moment later, as he stepped out of a shadow and slammed her in the back just before she reached the kitchen. He drove her into the bathroom from which he had just exited. Arms pinwheeling, her lungs gasping to pull in air, her foot skidded on the floor mat and she slid into the gleaming porcelain wall of the bathtub. Her left arm broke the plane of the plastic shower curtain, and she pulled it down around the guard as he reached over to grab her. Driving her body upward, she sought to entangle him in the stiff folds. She smacked away his grasping fingers. She could see his features twisted and distorted with effort through the translucent curtain, and when she slammed the heel of her hand into his nose a bright red rose of blood bloomed on the plastic, obscuring his expression. But she could feel the growing dismay and, possibly, panic in the frenzied movement of his limbs, the uncoordinated shaking of his head like a wolf in a trap. She popped him one more time on the bridge of his nose and he lay still.

She turned, pushed the body off her, and stood, slamming the door shut. There was a pounding in her head and she felt her gorge rising. The taste of stomach acid burned her throat. She shivered as she put her ear to the door, waiting for the sound of brogues to resume, but instead she heard whispers and recognized Rudy’s voice. Intuition told her what they were talking about. She could not use the little-girl act on Rudy again, and now was certain she couldn’t use it on the other guard, either. Bending down, she drew the unconscious guard’s .38 from its holster.

“Conlon!” Rudy called. “Conlon, are you okay?”

The cool heft of the handgun in her fist felt good, her forefinger lying beside the trigger like a cobra ready to spit its poison. There was an intoxication that came from holding a loaded gun, a sense of power that seemed to flow from the weapon into her hand, racing up her arm and into her brain. And it was this disorienting, larger-than-life feeling that caused her to remember what Jack had told her.
“I’d rather face an adversary with a gun than one with a knife,”
he’d cautioned her.
“Guns make you overconfident, they make you feel as if you can overpower any adversary, and that’s where the real danger to you raises its head.”

The problem was simple enough: She was in a cul-de-sac with no other egress but the one door; there was no window in this interior bathroom. This was why Rudy and his partner hadn’t stormed in. They didn’t know the situation in here, other than the fact that Conlon had been neutralized. But that also meant she was now armed, so they were waiting for her to emerge, at which time they would grab her and disarm her before she had a chance to shoot either one of them.

A shootout would only get her killed or wounded, so she couldn’t risk even poking her head out the door to assess the situation. She had to make do with whatever was available in the bathroom.

Her hands were shaking, her heartbeat elevated, her breathing erratic. Turning to the medicine cabinet over the sink, she scanned the shelves. She’d heard about spray cans, any of which she could have put into service now, but nowadays only pump sprays were available, and were of no use. But, scrounging around in the cabinet under the sink, she found a bottle of drain cleaner. Judging by its weight, it was at least half full. Her fear was palpable, a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth. She sought to tame it, because eradicating it was a waste of time.

Several deep breaths later, she jammed the bottle into the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, and turned her attention back to Conlon. He was still unconscious. Watching him softly breathe, an idea occurred to her. It might be crazy, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of a better alternative.

Temporarily sticking the .38 into her left front pocket, she bent and, grunting, lifted Conlon in his sticky cocoon onto his feet. It seemed a long, laborious project, but at last she had him on his feet, propped against the wall beside the door. She took a moment only to regain her breath, then, yanking open the door, she pushed him into the hall.

A moment later all hell broke loose.

Someone grabbed for Conlon as he fell into the hallway. In a blur of motion, she tossed the contents of the bottle of drain cleaner all over the front of the suit’s shirt. He immediately recoiled, shouting in shock and pain, Conlon’s insensate body toppled to the floor, and that was all the time she got. She tore herself away from other hands clawing at her from behind.

Vaulting over the fallen men, she ran toward the open doorway to the kitchen, but as soon as she got there she was forced to jump over the body of the cook or the gardener—one of Uncle Hank’s staff, anyway—which lay crumpled just beyond the doorway. With no time to find out if the man was dead or alive, Alli made for the back door. After being trapped in the bathroom, she had no desire to trap herself again down in the wine cellar.

She reached the glass-and-wood door more or less at the same time as her pursuer. She felt his powerful hand on her shoulder, pulling her backward, and, drawing the acquired .38, she whipped the barrel at his face. She heard a satisfying crunch of bone fracturing, and, released, she whipped the door open and fled outside.

It was raining, and she skidded badly on the slick flagstone surface leading to the gardens that comprised the inner circle of property at the rear of the house. She heard his breath first, then felt him on top of her as she struggled to regain her footing.

“Got you now, you little bitch,” Rudy said.

N
INE

J
ACK MOVED
the young man deeper into the rear of the shop to make certain no one overheard them.

“Go on,” he urged.

“Underground,” Thatë said.

“How far underground?” Jack asked.

“Not far enough … now.” Thatë made a disgusted sound at the back of his throat.

Jack saw that McKinsey had turned around and, staring through the front window, was watching him and Thatë talk. He wondered if McKinsey could lip-read. Turning his head away, he said to Thatë, “I want you to move into a section of the store where we can’t be seen from the street.”

Thatë did as Jack asked, and Jack soon followed him.

“I don’t like those two,” Thatë said, clearly referring to McKinsey and Naomi.

“You don’t like me, either.”

“Yeah, but them I’d knife—for real.”

“You really are a badass.”

Thatë didn’t know how to take that, so he did not respond.

“About the octagon symbol,” Jack prompted.

“A club.”

“I know all about clubs.”

“Not this kind of club.” Thatë’s eyes cut away, as if he’d rather be anywhere but here.

“And that would be?”

“Shit, don’t make me say it.”

“If I don’t,” Jack said, “someone else with a uniform and a much different attitude will.”

Thatë put his head down. Maybe this kind of life was getting too much for him, maybe he wasn’t cut out for it.

“Nothing legal about it.”

Jack took a step toward him. “You’d better have more for me than that.”

“Hold on. Don’t lose your shit all over everything.” The boy worried his lower lip, which was growing redder by the moment. “The club has a name. The Stem.”

Jack was going to say that he never heard of a club named the Stem, but instead he held his tongue. Something here didn’t feel right, the way it hadn’t felt right at the Billy Warren crime scene. He studied Thatë’s face, which held an expression of anticipation. In this situation it was the wrong emotion, as if he was waiting to see if “the Stem” held a special meaning for Jack.

Jack looked at the octagons—the badge and the pendant. He could focus on the one word that was identical to both of them. After a short struggle, he said to Thatë, “Pronounce this word for me.”

“What?”

“This word.” Jack tapped the octagons.

Thatë’s eyes slid away again for a moment, and Jack could read him now. He might as well take advantage of the teen’s nervousness.

“Speak it!” he ordered sharply.

“Rrjedhin.”
The word almost caught in Thatë’s throat, but he managed to splutter it out.

That was a word in a language with which Jack was familiar. Without missing a beat, he said,
“Sa jveç jeni?”

*   *   *

R
UDY SMELLED
unpleasantly of blood and sweat. He was as heavy as a Brahma bull and, lucky for Alli, as ungainly. His wounds had both maddened and impaired him. Blood streamed down his face, forcing him to blink continually to clear his vision, and it seemed as if his left knee, where Alli had struck him with the ash shovel, was shattered, because he dragged the leg behind him like a wrecked ship. But as she tried to get up, he used it like a club, the massive limb slamming against her hip so that they both cried out in pain at the same time.

But Rudy’s fist was already in her face, the heel of his hand pushing the underside of her jaw back, back, exposing the soft, vulnerable flesh of her throat. She heard a deep, guttural growl that threatened to turn her insides to water. She fought the desire to close her eyes, to let go, to release herself utterly into the undertow of his fury-fueled power and strength. There was a terrible, enervating moment when she experienced the female’s sense of acquiescing in the face of the male’s overwhelming brute physicality, both of body and personality. But then, remembering who she was, how close to both death and madness she had been, she shook herself awake, shook herself alive, and drove her forefinger straight up Rudy’s left nostril, pushing farther even as his head whipped back and forth like a bronco trying to unseat its rider. The soft, moist flesh of his sinus yielded to her fingertip, the arc of her nail slicing through tissue. Up farther into the bone of his skull, searching for the cavity that would end the threat to her life.

With a herculean effort, he threw her off him, clear over a hedge of azalea bushes. She rolled into a thick stand of pitch pines just beyond, the needles sweeping across her face like bony fingers. She could hear him snorting and moaning, flailing to regain his feet.

“I know where you are, little bitch! You’re beginning to believe you’ll get away, but fuck if you will!”

Rolling through the bed of fallen needles, she reached behind her for the .38, but it was gone. She must have lost it when Rudy had tossed her. Rudy began to crash through the azaleas, dragging his left leg behind him. Then she remembered the cell phone.

Pulling it out of the pocket of her jeans, she saw to her immense relief that there was a signal, now that she was outside the house. Her heart hammered wildly as she punched in Jack’s cell number.

She groaned as it rang and rang. She prayed for him to answer. Instead, she got his voice mail. “I’m at my Uncle’s Hank’s hunting retreat in Virginia. The guards he hired are after me.” She recited the address. “I’m out back with a fucking ginormous dirtbag on my ass. Please, please, please get me the fuck out of here.”

*   *   *

H
OW OLD
are you? That was what Jack had asked.

“Shtatëmbëdhjetë,”
Thatë said. Seventeen.

“Ju jeni shqiptar.”
You’re Albanian.

“Si nuk ju flas shqip?”
How do you speak my language?

Jack smiled and tapped the side of his head. “You’re going to take me to the Stem.”

All the color drained from Thatë’s face. “No.”

“Yes,” Jack insisted.

“Ju lutem, mos bëni mua.”
Thatë began to shiver.
“Ata do të vrasin mua.”