Dark Memories (The DARK Files Book 1) (26 page)

If only they could have this business with Markos behind them.

If only Janus would make his damn move.

Cole wanted the trap sprung, so he and Laura could get on with building a life together. Sure, the thought of her belly never swelling with his child saddened him, but he could get past that loss.

As long as he had her.

Decision made, he turned his gaze to the stage.

Cliff Trigger, played by a fresh-faced new guy with script in hand, helped his new-found love Debbie and her father, the police lieutenant, close the trap on the killer. Using a deception carried off by the obnoxious dowager, played to the snooty hilt by Doris Van Tassel, Cliff tricked the murderer into incriminating herself.

No,
himself
.

Wait a damn minute. Cole had never read the script nor seen the final act, so he didn’t know who committed the murders. He watched the climax in stunned silence, oblivious to the laughter and clapping around him.

As the denouement proceeded, Bea Van Tassel rushed over to him. She whispered, “Isn’t that a marvelous ending? The audience is fooled every time. No one suspects Cookie is a man. Stan Hart is perfect in the role. And the wig! If only he had that much hair, poor man.”

Cole nodded. In the unisex outfit of baggy pants, striped shirt and white apron, Stan sure as hell looked like a motherly, middle-aged woman. Cole had just figured they didn’t have a woman to play the part. Duped him along with everybody else. And he’d watched a rehearsal or two.

Amazing. Cookie turned out to be the supposedly dead owner of a bankrupt ski resort, a man who for years plotted revenge against all the people who he imagined responsible for his ruin. He knew them, but they didn’t know each other.

Devious. He watched Cookie, minus his wig and chef’s hat, be handcuffed and led away.

A dual role.
A successful hit man might have to play a dual role. One respectable for the public. One underground, clandestine.

Cole scraped a hand through his hair. More ways to examine the damn puzzle only gave him more headaches. No answers.

The performance would end in a few minutes. After the curtain calls, he and Laura were slated to help clean up. He turned toward where she was standing.

No Laura.

Shit! “Where is she?”

Bea clapped her hands together. “I have to see my sister when the play ends. Wasn’t her fake death scene terrific?”

“Bea.” He gritted the words through his teeth. “Where. Is. Laura?”

For his harsh tone, he received a schoolmarmish frown and a haughty sniff. “I saw her head to the lobby.”

“Alone?”

“Someone was with her. I didn’t see who. What—?”

The tracker on Cole’s phone put Laura still in the building. He slammed through the double doors at the back of the theater.

THE LOBBY WAS deserted.
Where the hell did she go? The tracker still had her inside, but the damn app wasn’t precise.
He turned toward the door to the stairs, 9mm in his hand. He took the stairs to the lower floor two at a time.

With everybody onstage or behind the orchestra seats, the corridor of storerooms and dressing rooms stretched ahead lit only by dim emergency lights. Silence reigned except for echoes above of voices and creaking boards.

Was she down here?
Who the hell had her?

He flattened against the wall. He adjusted the tiny microphone in his collar and tapped the button on his phone to call her.

No answer.

He tried again.

Nothing.

Why the hell wasn’t she responding? Suspicion crawled up his spine.

Byrne and Snow were stationed outside. Isaacs ought to be in the theater, and Ward was backstage. He tapped the button to connect to them all. “Two and Three, come in.” No response.

“Four, Five, you there?”

No response.

He shook the phone. It was working, but the connection to his team — and to Laura — was dead. What the hell was it with these high-tech gadgets? His laptop freezing. Now this.

Wait and see. Maybe his alarm was for nothing and she’d gone up the other stairs. He’d find her happily congratulating the actors as they came offstage.

But the itching on his scalp said different.

Something about the play, about Cookie’s dual role raked at his brain. A suspicion fuzzed and sharpened like a shadow puzzle. Staring at his phone, he almost had a grasp on how. What if the signals were jammed? Or tinkered with? That was it.

Now for who.
Slowly his mind made the connection.

Realization burned, an acidic poison in his veins.

Shoving away emotion, he inched along the corridor. At the first door, he crouched and stepped inside, sweeping the cramped space with his pistol. Prop storage. Old dummies, chairs, backdrops, the window seat from
Arsenic and Old Lace
.

Damn. There must be a dozen doors and little rooms like this one. The old box stalls from the structure’s stable days. He turned and straightened, ready to perform the same sweep farther down the corridor as applause erupted from above.

The long black snout of a gun suppressor projected around the doorjamb.

Before Cole had time to react, the weapon spat.

The bullet hit him square in the chest. White-hot pain hammered his bones. Fire filled his lungs. The impact threw him backward onto the cement floor. Shards of pain exploded in his skull.

But he was right. He knew.

Janus. The two-faced god.

He knew the name, the face as the darkness dragged him down.

Too damned late.

***

Laura’s captor shoved her down on the hard-packed dirt floor of the dark boat shed. With her hands tied and a gag in her mouth, she flopped to her side, helpless and numb. Her mouth and tongue were dry as sand, all moisture sucked out by filthy cloth.

A flashlight beam played over the walls. “Don’t move or you’ll be next.” The voice was familiar.

The identity of her captor stunned her. Kent Isaacs.

No, Janus. Isaacs was Janus. He shot Cole.

Cole! Oh God, Cole!

The menacing hiss of the silencer echoed over and over in her head. It branded her brain and pierced her heart. A dark shroud filled every crack in her soul.

Isaacs had forced her to go down to the wardrobe rooms. Shocked and stunned at the identity of her enemy, she was trussed up and gagged before she could react.

Then they waited.

When Cole came down the steps, she struggled against her gag, straining to warn him. Powerless.

Her phone was in her pocket, but she couldn’t reach it. The killer shoved her in among the soft folds of costumes, so she could kick nothing that would make noise.
He kept her pinned to his side with one hand. With the other he held the gun, made more evil looking with the matte-black metal extension.

If she somehow escaped from this terrible mess, she’d never forget as long as she lived what happened next. Isaacs dragged her along the corridor to the next open door. They stopped just as Cole turned, his sidearm raised.

The killer didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger.

Oh God, she could hear the muted sound of the gun firing. She saw the scene in slow-motion. The bullet slamming into Cole. The impact launching him backward. Then falling, falling with a sickening thump to the cement floor.

Where he lay motionless.

Her throat closed. She couldn’t breathe. If he died because of her, she didn’t want to live. Her chest ached as though her heart had been ripped out. She squeezed shut her eyes, the image of Cole, so still, branded on her pupils.

Then Isaacs had doused the lights and closed the door. He’d dragged Laura out of the theater building while the actors above were still bowing and blowing kisses during their curtain calls.

Was Cole dead? Or was he alive and bleeding? Would someone find him before it was too late?

Her pulse jittered, and her breath puffed in shallow pants. No, she couldn’t let the agony of it break her. Nor let it suffocate her. If Cole was alive, she was no good to him unless she could take control.

He had to be alive. She had to believe it.

She clung to the burning hope in her chest and worked to control her breathing. Slowly, in, out, until she was centered.

The boat shed’s familiar smells of musty dirt floor, varnish and bottom paint calmed her nerves. Piled up in the corner were the sails for her class. Anchors, life jackets and boat cushions hung on the walls. Old friends.

Now she would see what could be done.

Across the room, the rasp of a match caught her attention. Its flame was the only pinpoint of light. A moment later, the lantern always kept in the shed glowed with a steady light, casting shadows in the back corners.

The glare set in stark relief the features of the man standing over her.

Gone, the affable gardener in his green work khakis. Gone, the government officer. The hit man looked malevolent and cruel in his black trousers and sweatshirt.

But she understood at last how Janus had fooled them all. How he’d known where she’d be and when Cole would be away. How he avoided the surveillance. Half the time he did the surveillance. What she couldn’t fathom was why a respected DARK agent, supposedly the cream of intelligence officers, could also be a professional assassin.

She had tumbled down the rabbit hole.

The killer — oh God, Cole’s … approached her. She recoiled, scooting back until she hit a plastic crate. But he only bent down and removed the gag. The smell of his sweat wrinkled her nose.

“Don’t want to bruise that soft mouth.” He chuckled, more of a cackle. “This has to look like an accident. Stay put, or I’ll tie your feet too.” He walked away, weaving though the piles of boat equipment, and collected items that he piled close to the lantern.

The boat shed door stood ajar. The wind blew ragged curtains of fog and misty rain against the only window and through the narrow opening. The old sliding door creaked and groaned.

Working her cheeks and tongue, she forced saliva to moisten her parched mouth. A windmill of questions whirled in her head.
“You can’t hope to make my … death look like an accident. How can you explain the bullet in Cole?” Putting the events into words gave them too much reality. She trembled from the images in her aching skull and fought a wave of nausea.

She had to maintain her cool. She had to.

Thank goodness for Burt’s laziness. Once the shed was cleaned up, he’d started leaving some garden tools inside. Within reach was a small folding saw, locked in the open position.

If she could saw through her bindings…

Isaacs barked a laugh that sent shivers down her spine. “It appears the lovers have had a spat. First you shot him with this gun. I’ll hate to leave this little black-market beauty behind, but those are the breaks.” He held up the small lethal instrument.

She had to keep him talking. If she could free her hands, she could reach the phone’s panic button. Maybe it would reach one of the other officers.

No wonder the mysterious attacker Tuesday night had known the stage so well even in the dark. Isaacs had worked all over the theater side by side with the lighting techs.

“A lover’s quarrel. No one will believe that.”

On a shrug, he tucked the gun into his holster and began shredding a boat cushion with a pocketknife.

She backed away from him. And closer to the saw.

“Yeah, doll, they will.” To hear this jackal’s plot in matter-of-fact tones chilled her to the core. “Lots of people noticed that you weren’t speaking to each other today. I made sure of it.”

She rubbed her bound wrists across the blade. The jagged edge bit into her as it shredded at the rope. She controlled her breathing and ignored the sting, the feel of blood soaking into the braided material.

Such a small amount of blood. Nothing to her.

“Then in your panic,” Isaacs continued, apparently proud of his plan, “you ran to the boat shed — which you opened up with your key.”

He held up the padlock with her key inserted, then tossed it aside.

“Once inside, you bumped your head. When you fell, you knocked over this handy lantern. Too bad for such a classy chick to die in a fire. Hell of a shame. But my regrets will be overcome when I check my Swiss bank account.”

She forced herself not to dwell on the future the killer mapped out for her.

She sawed at the rope.

A sneakered foot kicked away the garden saw. It landed with a clatter against the wall.

He slapped her. “I told you not to move!”

“No!” She rolled to her side.

“I warned you, bitch.”

Her face stung with fiery needles. Damn. She’d been so close. Tears burned, but she refused to let him see weakness.

He yanked at her hands and checked the rope. Unfortunately it was still whole. From somewhere he produced another length of the braided fiber. “Now you’ll stay put.”

While he bound her ankles together, she searched for flaws in his plan. “How will you explain my being tied up? Will you untie me after you knock me out?”

“I could untie you, but I don’t think I will. Markos was right about you being clever.” He twisted the cap off the lantern fuel can and grinned with satisfaction. “Those are custom-made paper ropes. They leave no marks, and the fire will reduce them to unidentifiable ashes.”

He crossed the room and sprinkled the clear fluid over the cushions. The acrid petroleum smell stung her nostrils. Isaacs had once been an ATF agent, so he’d know better than most how to start a whiz-bang fire that looked accidental.

The lantern’s flame flickered and danced. It animated his shadow against the wall.

She had little time. He was going to overturn the lantern and set the shed on fire. Her only chance was the phone. She prayed Isaacs didn’t know she had it.

The serrated blade hadn’t cut through, but her efforts had stretched the rope and loosened its grip. Her pulse skipped. Spreading the fuel around occupied her captor.

Keeping an eye on him, she lowered her hands to her right side. She twisted so she could inch her right hand into her pocket. Good. She touched the device. It might save both Cole and her. She prayed he still lived.