Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery (32 page)

Shocked, she staggered a few steps and tried to run. He moved up alongside her and tripped her. Hitting the pavement with her hands bound was an interesting experience. He yanked her up by her wrists, raising the interest level even further.

The tape muffled her shriek of anguish. Once he had her on her feet, he leaned in close and spoke.

For the first time, she glimpsed his face. But she’d known: Garner, of course.

“Next time, I’ll cut
your
throat just like his. Now
walk.
”

She obeyed, wondering wildly where they were going, and if anyone would find her.

And if she’d still be alive when they did.

• • •

THE ALLEY LET OUT BETWEEN THE SENIOR CENTER AND A
driveway with a fence running along it, adjacent to the massive old wood-framed Baptist church.

Back in New York, the night sky never really went black. But in Eastport, a hundred-plus miles from the nearest city’s light pollution, the night sky prickled with stars.

And up here, away from all the commotion on Water Street, everything was quiet. Garner hustled her roughly along the fence-lined driveway to where it ended at a garage. The house the garage belonged to was dark except for a dim porch lamp, its glow not even reaching the yard. No one home …

“Hurry up.” Garner put a foot in the small of her back and shoved. She fell forward over a lawn chair onto the cool grass and rolled hard to the right, hoping to find some hiding place, a low bush or maybe a picnic table.

If she could just get away from him for a moment, she could get the tape off her wrists; she’d started yanking at it right away, so it was already down around the broad part of her hands. In darkness, her shoulders found the hollow at the foot of a huge tree, and she curled herself into it, praying.

But his footsteps followed unerringly. A thin flashlight beam pierced the darkness and found her. His hand shot out, its vicious grip on her ear agonizing as he dragged her up.

The blade touched her throat. “Through there.” He let the flashlight beam rest briefly on a lattice screen at the rear of the yard.

Set up between two tall, bushy cedar trees, it gave the yard an illusion of privacy, she supposed as she scanned it hopefully. But if you didn’t mind getting all scratched up by cedar boughs, it would be easy enough to push through to the next yard.

That is, if you weren’t beat up and tied up. Squeezing her eye closed tight to protect it—the one that wasn’t already swollen shut—she pushed between a tree and the lattice. On the other side, she might get a second chance to—

But the instant she was through, he was right there behind her. He grabbed her arm and the flashlight came on again, picking out an old, moss-covered brick path.

A garden path … suddenly she knew where she was. The Senior Center, the old church, and …

The old house loomed in front of her. He yanked her sideways with a tug on her wrist bindings, then stopped.

Her heart sank; she’d nearly had the damned things off. With a snort of irritation, he grabbed her hands, pulled them together, and wound more tape onto them, from forearms to fingertips.

Then he continued tugging her toward what turned out to be an old porch, its paint entirely absent in the flashlight’s glow and its ancient decking splintered and broken.

And I thought mine needed work
. The thing was a recipe for a broken ankle.

“Careful. Don’t hurt yourself.” She could hear the smirk in his voice. Unsteadily she made it up the first step, and then the second.

At the top she looked up at the old door.
If I go in there, I’ll never
 …

Hurling herself backwards at him, she didn’t care if she fell or how. With a grunt of dismay, he landed beneath her, his knife clattering away, his hand scrabbling sideways for it.

He squirmed from beneath her and jumped up, but instead of trying to get up, too, she kicked both feet up and out at him, aiming for his knees.

Her heels hit his thighs, forcing an
mmph
from him but not fazing him. Instantly he was on her again, his clenched right fist coming around like a swung hammer to the side of her head.

Down and out
. A prizefighting term, she recalled having heard Wade explaining it, somewhere over there in what once was her own other, much better life.

The one she was leaving.

She couldn’t move, a lethargy so profound seizing her that she had
to decide whether or not to take each separate breath. Even the headlights passing by just yards away, so that now she was within shouting distance of help, failed to motivate her.

Because for one thing, her mouth was taped. And for another, she wasn’t sure she was even
in
her body anymore.

Garner kicked the door. It fell open with a shriek of rusty hinges and the crack of a breaking frame. Then he stood over her again.

When she didn’t get up, he kicked her, but she didn’t feel it, or not as pain, too disorganized by the punch to the head to be processing anything.

Sam
, she thought.
Wade
.

Someone hauled her to her feet, shoved her forward at a tall rectangular dark opening. She didn’t want to go through it.

A bad smell drifted from it: dampness, old dirt, and mouse droppings mingled with a lemony whiff that was like Bella’s spray cleanser. As he pushed her in, her thoughts fritzed in and out like sparks from a bad power cord.

Trying without success to seize on some shred of an idea and cling to it, she tripped and nearly fell over a deck board that was sticking up. Sharp splinters from the board pierced her skin.

Then another explosion from the direction of the waterfront shook the house. Inside, in the darkness still reverberating with the boom, plaster bits rattled down.

With a hand as strong as a metal claw, he helped her up again.

If you could call that help.

INSIDE, THE AIR WAS THICK WITH ANTIQUE DUST SHAKEN
loose by the explosion. The instant he let go of her, she tried to run, but he caught her and threw her to the floor.

Her face smacked the side of what felt like a porcelain sink on the way down, then struck the gritty floorboards.

Bella would have a field day in here
. At floor level, the stench of mice
and old dirt was even stronger, still oddly mixed with the sharp scent of spray cleaner.

She lay there trying to catch her breath. Across the room, he was fiddling with something; she couldn’t see what.

Something heavy, by the door. But it was even darker in here than it had been outside, which seemed impossible, given that the house had windows, and if nothing else the streetlights in front of the place should be—

A battery lantern snapped on. Through the eye that wasn’t swollen shut
—yet
, she thought with bleak realism—she could see the black plastic trash bags taped to the windows. At the sight, a bit of hope drained away; so much for any passersby accidentally glimpsing her predicament.

Heavy thuds from the doorway area drew her sluggish gaze back. By the lantern light, he was using a claw hammer to nail the door shut, using one of the broken boards from the porch decking to cover the opening, and the nails still sticking out of the board.

He wasn’t doing a great job. Three out of the four big nails bent before he could hammer them home. But it would be enough to keep anyone else from pushing that old door open very easily.

In the unlikely event that anyone tried.
The phone, though, I’ve still got the—

As if triggered by her thought, its ring sounded from her pocket. He dropped the hammer, strode across the ruined kitchen, bent and pulled it out of her jacket pocket.

She didn’t even have the strength to resist. Not that
that
came as a surprise; Victor the brain surgeon—
the late great
, she thought disorientedly—used to say the human skull was like a metal bowl full of water.

Smack the bowl, watch what happens to the water. Smack the head, same thing happens to the brain. The only difference being that the skull kept the brain from slopping out.

Lying there on the old floor, waiting for the newly arrived hideous waves of nausea to subside—yet another unpleasant consequence of
concussion—she hoped her own brains hadn’t begun leaking out of her ears.

But at the moment, she couldn’t be certain. And if what good old Victor used to say was any guide, it would all get much worse long before it got better.

Great
, Jake thought. The phone was still emitting the ringtone she’d programmed into it: the first thirteen notes of the “Anvil Chorus.” It had seemed like a funny tune to put on an old-house-repair hobbyist’s cellphone.

At the time. Garner switched the ringer off, dropped the device on the floor, and stepped on it. Crunchy bits of plastic flew, as did her last hope of summoning help.

From outside came the occasional distant rumble of a car going by, heading out of town on Washington Street. But most of the crowds were gone, even the vendors were heading home, and—

It hit her suddenly, what she
wasn’t
hearing: sirens. No cop cars screaming in or ambulances howling out. Whatever happened on the barge must’ve created casualties.

But they weren’t being transported up Washington Street, and that’s how they’d have gone, on their way to the nearest hospital forty miles distant.
Unless—

Unless nobody had survived it. She swallowed hard, tasting blood and fear. One of the few remaining sections of plaster in the old ceiling chose that moment to fall, crashing to the floor in a choking cloud of plaster dust.

The house must’ve shifted. In the massive vibration of all those fireworks exploding at once, it
 …

Garner frowned, shaking his head impatiently as if all the unexpected noise and disruption were almost more than he could bear. Then he squinted down, assessing her, yanked hard at the tape around her wrists, and tried pulling on the patch of it that he’d slapped over her mouth.

“Good,” he said, and his mild tone of approval combined with the
intensity of his dark eyes gave her the creeps, even through the pain of her injuries.

Inappropriate … the term didn’t even begin to cover it. “Now you just wait for me. I’m going to go get cleaned up. After that, we’re going to have a little chat, you and I.”

Yeah, right
, she thought, fully aware that her situation went way beyond sarcasm but unable to stop. Because right now, sarcasm was the only weapon she had.

It helped the sick feeling in her stomach to realize that at least she could still slap the taste right out of this wing nut’s mouth in her imagination, and the first instant she got a chance to do it for real, she was going to—

Her fists clenched, flexing her numb fingers and stretching her wrists against their too-tight tape bonds, as she watched his shoes move away across the scarred kitchen floor.

The floor was also littered with trash and plaster, and pierced along its exterior walls by old heat pipes, plumbing pipes, a drainpipe, a gas pipe—

She felt her eyes widen. All at once an alternative reason for her nausea occurred to her.

Correction: it slammed into her like a highballing freight train.
Gas
 …

Now that she’d smelled it, it was obvious: the unmistakable rottenegg stench of propane. Just a tiny whiff of it mixed in with the other bad smells, and only down here, by the floor.

Because as she happened to know after Bella insisted she learn all about it before trading their old electric stove for a new, gas-powered one, propane was heavier than air.

And that’s why he hadn’t smelled it. The leak must’ve just begun, maybe during the fireworks explosions. As if to confirm this, more plaster fell; at the same time, a low, ominous groan issued from somewhere below her, probably in the cellar.

No no no
—but as fresh fright cleared the cobwebs from her brain, she realized it could be true.

The house must’ve already been in bad shape, some big beam rotted through or cracked, or maybe even cut when somebody was installing one of those pipes.

The notion that a beam was only as strong as its narrowest width had never penetrated some of those old do-it-yourselfers’ heads, as she’d learned to her sorrow in her own old house.

But even as she tried battling panic with practical thoughts, a worse thought arose: that more than one beam had been cut, and not long ago, either.

That the house had been deliberately made unstable … Her wrists strained wildly against the tape again and her breath came fast, shuddering in and out through her nostrils uncontrollably.

Because she could suffocate with her face down here on the floor. Or the house, recently prepared for demolition—even as she thought it, she knew it must be true—could collapse on her.

Alternatively, it could explode if he switched that battery lamp on in here again. Or—she stiffened, listening—Garner could just come back and kill her himself.

Which, from the sound of his footsteps returning in darkness, he was doing right now. And she couldn’t tell him about the gas,
or
the collapse potential of this old death trap, either.

Because he still hadn’t taken the tape off her mouth.

HE GOT HER INTO THE CELLAR BY DRAGGING HER ACROSS
the floor to the open doorway by her feet and pushing her through it. She hit the stepladder’s top platform with her bound-together wrists and slid headfirst down the step edges to the bottom, landing hard on her chin and elbows.

“Look out below,” he called down, and she rolled hard away, trying to hook the stepladder’s leg with her foot. But before she could, he was beside her again.

Getting up, he brushed fussily at himself. The sharp smell of spray cleaner drifted to her nostrils again.

So that’s where it came from
, she thought. What she didn’t smell here was the gas leak. Not yet …

But if it wasn’t stopped, it would pool on the kitchen floor and eventually stream down through the open cellar door as if it were a liquid, which was just what it would behave like, filling the cellar.