The Last Kiss Goodbye (5 page)

Tears filled her eyes, and she broke off with a shaky indrawn breath that turned into a sob. She trembled so violently that Charlie could hear her teeth chattering. Beneath the streaks of blood, her skin had gone beyond paper white to almost gray. If the girl hadn’t been wedged in the corner formed by the wall and the counter, Charlie thought that there was a good chance she would have collapsed.

“You’re safe now.” Charlie felt a fresh well of fellow feeling: this kind of terror she knew.
Safe
might not be exactly accurate, but it was close enough: as long as there was breath in Charlie’s body, nobody was getting to that girl again. She would have put a comforting arm around her guest, but the girl shrank away from her—clearly, doctor or not, she wasn’t coming across as all that reassuring, for which she knew she had Michael to thank—and with some chagrin Charlie let her arm drop. She was doing her best to project steady strength, to ignore the rushing adrenaline that caused her nerves to jump and her heart to jackhammer. But the situation—Michael, the girl, the possibility that some kind of murderous lunatic was right outside—was making it difficult. Way difficult. As she processed the possibility that whoever was out there had killed two other girls, she felt a wave of fear threaten. What she had first thought was likely a case of domestic violence was starting to sound like something even worse.

Something horrifyingly familiar.

“At least get the hell away from the windows.” Michael’s voice held a note of barely controlled ferocity that made her breath catch. He, too, was clearly afraid—for her. “Unless you like the idea of giving some looney tune the chance to put a bullet in your brain, that is.”

Oh, God, he had a point. Darting another fearful look at the black blankness of the windows, Charlie touched the girl’s arm, saying, “Probably we should try to get below the counter.”

The girl jerked her arm away, and moved as far from Charlie as she could get, which wasn’t very far.

“I don’t know,” she sobbed into the phone while fixing wary, tear-filled eyes on Charlie. “He was chasing me. Oh, I need them to
hurry.
”

“See, that’s normal survival instinct. Teen-queen there spots trouble, at least she has the sense to try to get away from it,” Michael said. Charlie’s response was an aggravated thinning of her lips and a quick glare thrown his way. That’s when Charlie realized that she could see him again. Although he was still a little foggy around the edges, she was getting enough detail to know that he was looking at the girl like she guessed he might have looked at a live bomb.

“We need to get down.” As Charlie gestured at the windows then dropped into a crouch, the girl’s eyes went even bigger than before. “He could shoot through the glass.”

With one more terrified glance at the windows, the girl followed suit, letting her back slide down the wall, sinking down until she was folded in a soggy huddle with her chin almost touching her knees. A puddle was already forming around her as her eyes locked with Charlie’s. They were glassy with fright.

“I don’t
know,
” she answered the operator. “They just need to get here.
Please.
”

“Look, I …” Charlie began, meaning to conclude with,
I’m on your side,
only to be interrupted by the sound of the Ewells’ phone being picked up at last.

“Hello,” Ken’s wife, Debbie, said in her ear.

“It’s Charlie Stone across the street.” In the spirit of not wanting to further spook the girl, Charlie tried hard not to sound as panicky as she was starting to feel. “I need Ken over here right away. There’s a girl in my kitchen, and she says—” explaining the whole thing was going to be too complicated and time-consuming, and anyway Charlie still had no idea precisely what the whole thing was, so she cut to the chase, “there’s a man with a gun after her. We need Ken
now.
”

“Cops going to get here any faster ’cause you’re hanging out with The Black Dahlia here in the kitchen trying to get yourself killed? Run upstairs and lock yourself in your bedroom and stay put until the po-po show up.” A solid-looking presence now, Michael planted himself between her and the girl. That was deliberate, Charlie knew, as was his aggressive stance. Whatever he was or wasn’t, where she at least was concerned he seemed to have a marked protective streak. Of course, since she was all that was anchoring him to the world of the living that shouldn’t come as a big surprise. “Damn it, Charlie, you’re not doing her one bit of good by sitting here looking into her eyes. You’ve done your Mother Teresa thing: you let her in. Cops are coming. So leave her to it and
go.
”

Shooting him a shut-up-or-die look, Charlie gave a quick, negative shake of her head.

“How far away are they?” the girl moaned to the dispatcher.

“He’s in bed asleep,” Debbie objected. Of course, it was nearing midnight. In Big Stone Gap, that was late for decent folks.

“Can you
wake him up
?” Charlie did her best not to yell on that last part, with indifferent success. At the same time she watched Michael disgustedly mime a gunshot to his own head with a thumb and forefinger and frowned direly. The frown was directed at Michael, of course, but the girl, whose eyes she had been holding until she had flicked that sharp
stop it
look up at Michael, shrank away. “I really, really need him. Like I said, there’s a girl in my kitchen being chased by a
man with a gun.
”

“Well, I guess.” There was a sound that Charlie interpreted as Debbie laying the receiver down. Over the still-open line, she listened to her neighbor calling to her husband. Who as far as she could tell wasn’t answering.

Damn it.

“I’m Jenna McDaniels,” the girl said into the phone on a shuddering intake of breath, in obvious answer to a question posed by the dispatcher. “I was kidnapped three days ago. The other girls are—uh, w-were— Laura Peters and Raylene Witt. There has to be somebody looking for us. Are the police even
close
?”

Jenna McDaniels? Even caught up in the aftermath of a nightmare as she had been, Charlie had heard of the University of Richmond sorority girl who had vanished from a college-sponsored event just as preparations for the fall rush were getting under way: reports of the disappearance had been all over TV. But Charlie didn’t have the chance to do more than look at her with widening eyes, because a sound—a faint rattle from the direction of the back door—froze both her and Jenna in place. Suddenly as still as rabbits with a dog nearby, united by fear, they shot simultaneous panicky looks in the direction of the sound, to no avail: the solid base of the breakfast bar was in the way, preventing them from seeing anything beyond it. But for Charlie at least, there was no doubting what they had heard: the doorknob rattling. Her heart thudded in her chest. Goose bumps chased themselves over her skin. As she strained every sense she possessed in an effort to divine what was happening beyond that door, she tried to swallow, only to discover that her mouth had gone desert dry.

This can’t be happening.

“He’s here,” Jenna gasped on a note of purest horror, her hand around the receiver tightening until her knuckles showed white. The wad of paper towels she had been holding to her forehead dropped, forgotten, as her hand fell. Oblivious to the blood that still oozed from the cut, she shot Charlie a petrified look.

Charlie knew exactly how she felt.

“That’s it,” Michael barked at Charlie as his big, semi-solid-looking body surged right through the breakfast bar in a preemptive rush toward the back door and whoever was on the other side of it. “Move your ass. Upstairs.
Now.
”

CHAPTER THREE

“Don’t go outside. You might get sucked in. You need to stay close to the running water,” Charlie called urgently after him as, galvanized by fear, she shot into motion herself. If he heard her, she couldn’t tell: he had disappeared from view. Physically formidable in life, in death Michael could provide her with about as much in the way of actual protection as a whisper of air, although he didn’t seem to remember that most of the time and there were indeed occasional moments when he solidified and was once again the badass he had formerly been. Not that those moments were anything that he could control, or she could count on, so she didn’t. Thrusting her cell phone into her pants pocket, careful to stay hunched over so that she couldn’t be seen through the windows, Charlie lunged across the kitchen toward the only possible source of a weapon in the house: the silverware drawer.

Pathetic? Oh, yeah. But she had no gun, no burglar alarm, no real defensive system set up in the house, because after what felt like a lifetime of it she had been sick to death of living her life in fear.

“Who are you talking to? There’s nobody there,” Jenna wailed. Then, into the phone as Charlie threw her a startled, self-conscious look because she hadn’t even realized that she had been talking to Michael out loud, Jenna added in a voice that shook:
“He’s here. He’s trying to get in the door. Tell the police to hurry. Please, please tell them to hurry.”

Trotting out her standard line that she was talking to herself seemed pointless under the circumstances, so Charlie didn’t bother. Pulse racing, eyes fixed on what she could see of the windows—she could make out nothing beyond the darkness and the rain, which was falling heavily now, but she knew,
knew
that someone malignant was out there—Charlie snatched a steak knife from the silverware drawer. Then cautiously raising her head above the level of the counter, she did a lightning scan of the kitchen. Despite the fact that she was focused on the whereabouts of the man with the gun, the thought that instantly struck her was,
No sign of Michael.
The panicked realization curled through her mind, threading through the more immediate issue of getting to safety like a worm through soft wood. Was Michael outside, or had he been sucked back into Spookville? Not that it made any real difference: in either case, there was nothing she could do.

And right then, living through the next few minutes was paramount.

Gesturing to Jenna to head for the hall, acutely conscious that the bad guy might be right outside and even, possibly, able to hear them, Charlie whispered, “Our best bet is to lock ourselves in my bedroom until help gets here. Upstairs, second door on the right.”

Jenna nodded jerkily. Breathing
“Hurry”
one more time into the phone, Jenna dropped the receiver. Staying low, she darted toward the hall with Charlie right behind her. Without the sheltering breakfast bar to conceal them, they had to be perfectly visible to whoever was outside as they flew across those last few yards. Charlie imagined that she could feel eyes—evil eyes—trained on them the entire way, and a cold chill snaked down her spine.

“
I’m scared.” Along with that charged whisper, Jenna threw a hunted look back at Charlie as they gained the dubious security of the shadowy hall and raced down it toward the stairs. Blood and tears mixed on Jenna’s face: she looked ghastly in the dim light. Drops of water splattered the floor in her wake, making it dangerously slippery beneath Charlie’s unaccustomedly high heels. She would have kicked them off if it had been possible, but it wasn’t: the elegant sandals had ankle straps.
Do not fall down.
“He’s going to kill me, I know it. Oh, please don’t let him get me again
.”

At the terror in Jenna’s expression, Charlie felt cold sweat break out on her own brow. “I won’t. I promise. Head up the stairs.”

A sudden loud
thud
from the kitchen—Oh, God, was that the sound of the door being kicked in?—sent Charlie’s heart leaping into her throat.
This has to be a nightmare.
Only it wasn’t. Jenna threw a horror-stricken look back at her.

“
What was that? Did he just break in?” Her eyes were wild.

Shaking her head—a silent
I don’t know
—while her blood ran cold, Charlie mouthed,
“Go.”

The police—Ken Ewall—help—would be there at any second. Charlie hoped. No, she prayed. But would they be in time? If he was already in the house—she couldn’t finish the thought. Strain her ears though she might, she could hear nothing else from the kitchen over the clatter of her own and Jenna’s harried footsteps and the harsh pant of their combined breathing.

That very stillness made her stomach cramp. She couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder.

Where is he?

Jenna was on the stairs, clambering up them like she expected to be grabbed from behind at any second. It was a noisy, clumsy progress that no one who was inside the house could possibly miss hearing. Clenching her teeth in an effort to keep a lid on her own fear, Charlie grabbed the newel post, meaning to fly up the stairs in Jenna’s wake. The sudden loud buzz of the doorbell caught her by surprise before she could so much as plant a foot on the steps. Both she and Jenna squeaked and jumped like terrified mice.