The Ex Who Glowed in the Dark (Charley's Ghost) (22 page)

“Both? What about me?” Charley sounded hurt, but he was good at doing that when the occasion called for it. Nevertheless, he had helped.

“You’re all beautiful!”

She leaned closer to the hole and drew in a deep breath, expelling the musty, rotting smells of the cellar from her lungs, drinking in the clean scents of dust and sunshine and open spaces.

“Destroying property? I believe that’s a criminal offense.” Scott leaned over and peered inside.

Chapter Nineteen

Amanda’s heart sank to the very ends of her toenails. She’d gone from thinking the plan of digging out had no chance, was something to keep them occupied so they wouldn’t think about what was going to happen, to believing freedom was within their reach. Then Scott’s grinning face had robbed them of that possibility of freedom.

A dark anger swelled inside her. The man had no right to be there, no right to keep them prisoner and certainly no right to terrify them by threatening their lives.

She lifted her rusty piece of pipe, took aim and stabbed through the hole as hard as she could. The pipe connected with a satisfying thud that shuddered up her arm. Scott fell backward, howled in pain and cursed.

Amanda felt a brief rush of exultation before the
Glock appeared in the opening. Damn! She whacked the gun sideways with her pipe just as Alice squeezed the trigger. The bullet went somewhere outside, off to the left.

“Get down!” she shouted, shoving Dawson and Grant to one side of the opening and flattening herself against the other side. The crazy woman could start shooting wildly at any minute. 

Charley huddled next to her against the wall. She looked at him, and he grinned sheepishly. “Habit.”

She wondered how many bullets he’d dodged in his lifetime that it had become a habit.

“Roger’s going to open the door,” Scott called, “and you three are going to walk out like compliant captives. If you bring whatever you hit me with, Alice will shoot you. If you do anything stupid, Alice will shoot you. If you anger me, Alice will shoot you. Alice has become quite fond of that gun and would really like to shoot you anyway, so I suggest you walk out with empty hands at your sides and pleasant expressions on your faces.”

Scott’s calm words chilled Amanda more than passing through Charley would have. If Roger was back and Scott was calm, that probably meant he hadn’t spotted Jake and Ross coming down the road, rushing to the rescue. Not good.

But she wasn’t going to give up without a fight. She considered hiding the piece of pipe on her person, but that was the downside of wearing tight jeans. No room to hide weapons.

From outside metal scraped and clunked across the wooden door. Abruptly it lifted, allowing the evening sunlight to flood the room.

Dawson and Grant blinked in the sudden glare and looked at Amanda as if expecting her to tell them what to do. Great. When had they held a meeting and elected her the leader? Of all the things she was not qualified for, taking charge of a life and death situation ranked right up there with singing for the Metropolitan Opera.

However, she didn’t seem to have much of a choice other than to try.

“We’re coming out quietly,” she said. “I’m putting down my weapon.” She laid the piece of pipe on the floor then walked as steadily as possible toward the light of the open door, pretending to be brave and hoping to give Dawson and Grant courage by her phony example.

If Scott was using the threat of Alice shooting them to make them come out rather than just killing them in the
cellar, that must mean they believed her story that Dawson knew the location of the program they wanted so badly. Of course, since he didn’t know, they were only buying time.

She straightened her spine and met Roger’s gaze unflinchingly as she moved up the steps. So they were buying time. Every minute they delayed gave them a chance to figure a way out. This wasn’t over until the crazy woman actually hit somebody with that
Glock.

“Check her to be sure she doesn’t have any more sharp objects,” Scott said.

Amanda turned to look at him and smiled. She’d given him an ugly, bloody wound in his cheek. “You might want to check into getting a tetanus shot. That pipe was really rusty.”

Scott’s eyes narrowed to slits and Amanda thought—hoped—she could see the blood pulsing angrily and painfully behind his injury.

“You really need to keep your mouth shut and back off,” he said. “Your friend has something I need. You don’t. You’re expendable.”

“And you’re—”

“Amanda!” Charley interrupted. “For once in your life, think before you open your mouth!”

Dawson moved up beside her. “Do what he says.”

At first she thought he was telling her to take Charley’s advice but then realized he was referring to Scott’s orders. She lifted her arms and held her hands out to show Roger she had no weapons.

He made a tentative move toward her as if he was thinking about doing a pat-down. Charley punched him in the face.

Roger looked startled, lifted his hand to his nose and backed up. “She doesn’t have anything,” he assured Scott.

Scott nodded toward the back porch.
“Inside.”

Making a determined effort to stomp along in her boots rather than shake in them, Amanda led the way up the rickety wooden steps, through a door that dangled from one hinge and into what had once been a kitchen. It still held a stained sink under a broken window, another ladder back chair with only three legs and a drop leaf table with one leaf. Straw, dirt and bird droppings littered the floor, but light streamed in through the dirty, broken windows. For that reason, it was a better place to be than the cellar.

“Keep going,” Scott ordered. “We’ve got the laptops set up in the living room.”

That room was slightly cleaner than the kitchen. A dilapidated sofa and chair had been shoved against one wall and the middle of the floor had been swept. Three sleeping bags were rolled and waiting along the wall. Four laptops were set up on a new, clean folding table with three folding chairs.

Dawson would be expected to produce the program, and then they’d all be killed like his parents had been. Actually, they’d probably die slow, horrible deaths with Alice taking several shots to kill each of them. Amanda wondered if the woman had enough bullets to finish the job considering how bad her aim was. Maybe they’d just bleed to death in excruciating pain.

As unofficial leader, she had to come up with some way to keep that from happening, but at the moment she was fresh out of ideas.

Scott waved a hand toward the table where the laptops sat surrounded by soda cans and fast food wrappers with a brown purse on the far end. “Come up with that code or you belong to Alice.”

Dawson and Grant sank down onto two of the chairs and looked at each other
then at Amanda. She didn’t see much in the way of weapons. An empty aluminum can didn’t have the same potential as a broken beer bottle. The purse which probably belonged to Alice might contain something she could use, but the woman would shoot her before she had a chance to empty its contents and look.

“Now would be a good time to come up with a new plan,” Charley said. “Don’t think of them as crazed murderers. Think of them as your dad when you get in trouble and he’s about to punish you.”

Amanda had usually been able to wrap her stern father around her little finger, but her mother had been a whole other story. Her best defense against that woman had always been a good offense.

“Go ahead, Dawson. Give them the code. I know you don’t want to, but we don’t have a choice.” With no enthusiasm Dawson pulled one of the laptops over to him and cast Amanda a terrified glance. She turned her attention back to Scott and gathered her courage, determined to be offensive. “I am sick to death of hearing about this stinking code. What does this program do that’s so freaking important you’ve killed people and ruined lives to get it? What the heck is Project Verdant? Pardon me if I don’t buy into this business of your being skilled programmers. If you’re so great, why don’t you just write your own program? What’s so special about this one?”

“Doesn’t your friend here know all about it? Didn’t his father leave him a letter?” Scott asked. “Or was that another lie?”

Oops. “He knows where the code is. That’s all that was in the letter. He doesn’t know what it does. You have put us all through hell and you’re going to kill us because of this stupid program. The least you can do is
tell us what the heck is so special about it.”

“Fine.”
Scott pulled out the third chair and sat down, laying the gun on the table. Alice grabbed it immediately. She really did have a thing for that Glock.

Grant rose. “Sit here, Amanda.”

“Thank you, Grant. That’s very sweet of you, but I’m okay.” She preferred to be on her feet, ready to run.

The boy stood rigidly beside the chair. “I’d feel better if you’d sit.”

Such polite manners. Or maybe he just didn’t want to be at the table with Scott. She couldn’t blame him for that. She walked over to the chair, telling herself to keep her cool and pretend they were at a dinner party, not a murder party. Grant reached for her hand and she took his, intending to clasp it in a reassuring grip, but she felt something sharp in his palm. She flinched and almost drew back but then realized he was trying to hand her his piece of broken gorilla glass from her cell phone.

She folded her fingers around the glass and accepted it along with the responsibility it implied. He was counting on her to save them.

She sank down on the chair and leaned toward Scott in an attempt to distract his attention from Dawson’s flustered and unproductive efforts on the computer.

“So why can’t you write your own program if you’re such hotshot techno-nerds?”

She sensed Alice move up behind her an instant before the side of her face exploded in pain.

“You bitch!” Charley shouted, his hand sweeping futilely through Alice’s hand that held the
Glock. “Are you all right, Amanda?”

“Alice,” Scott said quietly, “that’s a gun, not a black jack. Don’t get it bloody.”

Amanda lifted a hand to her cheek. The skin felt raw, and she wondered if her jaw was broken. She’d been slapped and pistol-whipped by these creeps, and she was starting to get really pissed off. Somehow she’d get out of this alive and she’d teach these assholes some manners.

“We are
hotshot techno-nerds
. We’re certified in all the latest programming languages.” Alice clutched the gun in both hands. Her voice was bitter. “We were the best at what we did but then some executive with a room temperature IQ decided to outsource our jobs to India so he and his buddies could get two million dollar bonuses every year instead of just one million.”

Silence filled the room. This was obviously important, but Amanda couldn’t see how it related to the current situation. “Okay, that sucks. But what does that have to do with—” She spread her hands in a gesture encompassing the room, the computers, all of them.

“We didn’t take it lying down,” Alice said. “We didn’t go on unemployment, and we didn’t settle for jobs we were over-qualified for. We took what we were entitled to.” She shot an angry look at Dawson. “Until your father interfered and ruined everything.”

Dawson looked up at her, his fingers on the keyboard motionless. “My dad never hurt anybody.”

“Yes,” Roger said. “He did. He cut off our source of income.”

Dawson shook his head. “He was a college professor. He didn’t fire people or outsource jobs to India.” 

Alice snorted. “He might as well have. Project Verdant. Green. Money. We were taking what we deserved directly from the people who owed it to us, the country that should have protected our jobs and didn’t.”

Amanda glanced at Dawson. He looked as confused as she felt. “You stole from the government?” she asked. “What does that mean? You didn’t pay your taxes? You filed a phony FEMA claim?”

Alice made a noise that sounded as if she’d just laid an egg. Amanda finally decided it was supposed to be a laugh. “We used our skills. We wrote a program to take the salaries we should be earning directly from the Federal Reserve System.” She and Roger both beamed with pride at their accomplishment. Even Scott started to smile but then changed to a frown when the movement reached the raw wound on his cheek. He wouldn’t be able to smirk for a while without pain. Too bad.

“You hacked into the Federal Reserve System?” Dawson sounded astonished and, she thought, a little impressed.

“We were entitled to that money,” Roger said. “Your father had no right to stop us from getting it. His actions were just as bad as sending our jobs overseas.”

Dawson shook his head. “I don’t understand. My dad taught economics. What did he have to do with the Federal Reserve System?”

“Your mother,” Scott said. “She noticed something at the bank where she worked and told him to check it out. He found our program and tried to report us. Fortunately, we were tracking him from the minute he touched our code, so we intercepted that call. I posed as a treasury agent and met with him.”

Dawson looked thoughtful. “That’s what he meant about contacting the authorities but not trusting them.”