The More the Terrier (23 page)

Chapter 32

“Hi, Lan.”

I tried to stay calm despite the way he held on to my arm. That knife was much too close. He was breathing heavily. His white T-shirt and jeans both had holes in them, and there was a feral quality in his eyes that reminded me of a cornered rabid dog—which I’d seen in my former life as a veterinary tech.

“What are you doing here?” I continued.

“What I should have done before,” he hissed. “Getting rid of you.” The fact that he was thin didn’t mean he wasn’t strong. I realized that as I made a not-very-subtle attempt to pull away. He just held on tighter.

Zoey knew I was in trouble. As obedient as she is, she had started barking outside the door. That meant Brooke would come to see what was going on.

She could be walking into trouble, too, if I didn’t figure out how to warn her. Call her? Sure. But any attempt to get my BlackBerry out of my pocket might cause Lan to stab me immediately.

The room we stood in was an entry, where supplies and equipment would be kept for the cats and toy dogs for which the adjoining rooms had been designed. This whole structure was intended to take the place of the center building on our existing campus. Upstairs would be offices. By now, all the floors had been completed, and so had drywall on the walls, but only the second-floor improvements had been finished and painted.

But, foolish micromanager that I am, I’d insisted on having things as neat and clean as possible at the end of each day, so there weren’t any handy tools or boards or other weapons lying around that I could use.

“Why don’t we talk about this?” I said calmly. “Are you aware of our wonderful security system? We’d had some problems around here before, so I had our security company install hidden cameras. I’m not sure how you got in—”

“Not hard. Through the back door after some people in Animal Services uniforms went out.”

The SmART team. They wouldn’t have known that no one was to enter at the rear except for our staff and volunteers.

“Then your picture is undoubtedly on our system.” That actually could be true. “We’ve just had some cameras installed in here, too. See that?” I pointed up at a flaw I’d just noticed in the drywall. In any other circumstances, I’d have read the riot act to Halbert, the chief contractor. Right now, I wanted to hug him. “Why don’t we walk out of here? You can come into my office, and we’ll talk.”

And Brooke would see him and call the cops. All would be well. I hoped.

“No way. You know what? You’ve ruined my life already, mine and Darya’s. I did it. I killed Bethany Urber.” He had glanced up to where I’d told him the camera was. “Not Darya. I was the one who did it all—stealing from our own shelter. I got into some trouble and needed money. Darya had me help with the accounting, so it was easy for me to do. Bethany was wrong when she accused Darya. My Darya’s such a sweet, straight-laced woman . . . She’s innocent of everything.” That was all but shouted in the direction of the nonexistent camera.

“Then to help her, let’s go talk to the police,” I said calmly. “If you want to save her from a trial and prison and even worse, you have to step up now, Lan.”

“I have to kill you first!” he shouted. His grip on my arm had relaxed a little, but now he tightened it again, brandishing the knife in front of my face. I shuddered. I felt my body start to tremble. What was I going to do?

“Killing me won’t accomplish anything.” Fear quivered in my voice, and I cleared my throat in an attempt to minimize it. “It’ll just make things worse for you in the long run.”

“I’m not going to the cops. I’m going to kill you, because of all the trouble you caused for Darya. Then I’ll kill myself. She’ll go free, and I won’t be around to suffer.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I tried to say. But his arm raised and the knife he brandished started crashing toward me.

I yanked my arm free and moved just in time. I wanted to run out of there, but he was between me and the door. Zoey still barked outside. Was Brooke on her way?

I couldn’t dawdle to find out. I needed to do something . . . fast.

I saw the steps to the second floor and got an idea. I’ve never trained in any self-defense classes, but I’ve watched TV and movies. I kicked Lan right in the genitals as he tried to grab me again. He groaned and cupped himself, and the moment of distraction was enough. I ran for the stairway.

I pulled my BlackBerry from my pocket. As I leaped up the steps, I pushed the button programmed to call Brooke. “Help!” I shouted. “Call 911!”

I heard her say something like, “What the hell’s going on?”

“Lan Price is here. He’s crazy.” I hung up. I’d said all I’d needed to.

I reached the top of the steps. We’d planned on using this floor as a conference room and offices like our current center building, so there was no door to slam shut at the top. I could, however, go into one of the offices . . . and then another idea came to me. More foolish than the last one? Absolutely. And only to be used as a last resort—to save my life.

As Lan began running up the stairs behind me, I hurried into the office I’d been in earlier today. It had the largest balcony, so it had been the one where the SmART folks had set up their equipment to practice and get ready for tomorrow’s demonstration.

There were no locks on the door, and Lan Price, crazy, furious, and carrying a knife, was right behind me.

The pole SmART had set up was in the middle of the office floor, wedged from floor to ceiling. The ropes were still attached to it. It didn’t seem usable as a weapon, but that wasn’t my intention.

The sliding glass doors were open, with the ropes extending out onto the sturdy tripod gadget and below. I hurried onto the balcony. There was a lock on the sliding door, but only from the inside. It would have done me no good to close it.

I leaned momentarily over the balcony and stared at the dimly lit ground below.

Then I looked again at the three ropes attached to the tripod and extending downward. A pulley device with long straps on it hung near the metal contraption from one of the ropes.

Lan burst into the office. “I’ve got you now, you bitch!” he screamed.

I had only one option. I’d watched my kids do this sort of thing for fun, hadn’t I? And I’d seen the SmART team do it before in the interest of preparing to save animals.

Now, I needed to save myself.

I wasn’t wearing any of the protective gear required for the amusing or serious use of this equipment. I didn’t know if I could hold on. I didn’t especially like heights.

I didn’t have any choice.

I wrapped the rope attached to the pulley around me, tugged for an instant to make sure it wasn’t all falling over—and then, holding on to the top of the line nearest the pulley, I climbed over the concrete railing and let myself fall.

Chapter 33

Holding on to the line attaching my gear to the pulley, I sailed downward through the air, the breeze in the near darkness pelting my cheek.

What had I been thinking? Lan had a knife.

There were three nylon ropes tied parallel for safety reasons, but Lan would see which one held me. Would he have time to slice through it?

The descent had looked instantaneous as I’d watched the SmART exercise. Now, as I neared the midway point, I felt as if I was traversing the sky in slow motion. My legs dangled. I bit my tongue to avoid shrieking in terror.

With Zoey and the other dogs barking, no one would hear me anyway.

Something was suddenly different. The line holding the pulley—and me—seemed to go slack. I did scream then . . . just as my feet hit the ground. Nowhere near as skilled as the SmART members, I started to fall over—only to feel two hands grab me.

“Lauren, are you okay?” Brooke steadied me, her voice nearly inaudible over the cacophony of dogs nearby, and sirens in the distance.

“Absolutely.” I gave my security director a big, trembling hug. Only for a second, though.

“Then what the hell were you doing? That guy Lan—what did he . . . ?” Her voice tapered off as the other end of the rope slapped down near us. She looked toward the balcony, as did I.

Lan stared over the side, backlighted from the faint illumination that emerged from the room behind him, his face set in a rictus of anger.

“That’s Lan?” Brooke demanded. “Did he disconnect the line while you were on it?”

“He cut it with the knife he threatened to use on me. He’s Darya’s husband. Now, security expert, we need to try to keep him inside the building till the cops get here and arrest him.”

“No problem.”

I thought there were a lot of problems, but I determined to follow her lead. She was the expert, after all.

“The guy could be suicidal,” I called to her as she ran toward the gate between the two properties. “But even so, he’s armed and dangerous. Let’s not do anything foolish.”

“We won’t.” She opened the gate just long enough for Cheyenne to slip through onto the unpaved surface. She shut it in Zoey’s face, though my dog pounded at it to get through.

“Cheyenne could get hurt,” I yelled. “He’s not an attack dog.”

“You haven’t seen him since Gavin gave him lessons.”

No, I hadn’t. Nor had I believed a golden retriever mix would excel in security work. The breed is too sweet. But Brooke had told me that Cheyenne had really gotten into it.

I hoped now that she was right.

There were only two doors in the building, at the front and back. Multiple windows looked out onto the grounds, though. Lan could break one and dash out. I doubted that Brooke was armed. That wasn’t in her job description.

Nor mine.

If Lan did emerge, we’d have to let him go—although the sirens did sound as if the cops were closing in. Lan would probably not get far.

With Cheyenne at her side, Brooke paced the uneven ground at the side of the building, dashing between the front and the rear, where the only security lights were located—and they were dim. I decided to do the same thing on the other side, hoping I’d be able to see well enough to figure out what to do.

“Don’t try to stop him if he does come out,” I yelled to remind Brooke. “That knife of his is wicked.”

“I figured,” she returned. “I saw your rope.”

I did again, too, as I reached the other side of the building. I couldn’t see it well in the darkness, but it was mostly white, with blue stripes swirled around it. It lay on the ground in an uneven snake of lines and coils, still attached a short distance away, at ground level, to another of those tripods the SmART folks had erected, and anchored to stakes screwed into the ground. The other two ropes still hung above.

I saw Lan then—no longer upstairs. He was on the bottom floor, right inside the farthest window. With a crash, he broke it open. I wasn’t sure what he’d used to smash it, but I didn’t want to find out. Like Brooke, I wasn’t armed. Unlike Brooke, I’d seen his knife.

I also had an idea. This side of the building was around the corner from the one I’d zipped down. I grabbed the end of the severed rope as I saw Lan beating away some of the sharp glass shards protruding around the window frame.

He saw me then, too, as he climbed out. He brandished his knife again. “I’ll get you now,” he shouted. If he’d had a mustache, I’d have expected him to curl it in his fingers like one of those old-fashioned caricature villains—Snidely Whiplash, maybe, on the aging reruns of
Dudley Do-Right
cartoons that had sometimes been on TV when my kids were little.

But caricature or not, he was dangerous with that knife.

I saw Brooke come running. Cheyenne was in front of her. The dog could get stabbed before we humans could protect him.

That couldn’t happen. I took my end of the rope and ran not toward Lan, but away. The tripod held, and in moments I had used the length of the severed rope to shove Lan back toward the building and the open window. The contact and movement startled him—long enough to let Cheyenne get near. Exactly what I didn’t want.

But the dog didn’t attack. Neither did he approach while wagging his tail and attempting to make friends, as goldens were apt to do.

Instead, he stood there growling. Teeth bared, as if he was a vicious pit bull awaiting the chance to jump at Lan’s neck.

So Gavin really had trained him to growl on command.

“Get him away, or I’ll stab him,” Lan yelled.

At the same time, half a dozen police officers ran into the yard through the gate, guns drawn.

“Drop your weapon,” one called. “On the ground. Facedown.”

I’d gathered that Lan didn’t care whether he survived or not. Would he decide to end this now by failing to cooperate—or worse, attacking until they had no choice but to shoot him?

He looked around, from the uniformed cops aiming guns at him, to Cheyenne, to me. The knife was in his hand, stabbing at the air, toward the dog . . .

Then he knelt, putting the weapon onto the dirt. He petted Cheyenne once. “I didn’t really want to hurt you, guy,” he said, so softly that I could barely hear him.

Lan lay facedown on the ground as the cops dashed toward him.

There was barely time for Cheyenne to give Lan’s empty hand a lick. And then the angry, vicious, murderous human—who obviously loved dogs—was in custody.