“What?”
Maxine pointed toward the cell phone on Rebecca’s hip. “You
called for help. You said, if anybody’s listening, you were in trouble. You made a good guess, Beck. Somebody was listening.”
“It was you all along.” The barrel grew, if anything, steadier. “All that bullshit, those sounds, those voices, that was all you. Trying to disorient me. Manipulate me. Make me think I had no way out but to find what Jericho was hiding. That was you.”
“Not me. My clients.” A careless shrug. “The point is, you called for help, and I got your message, so to speak. So here I am. Ready to help.”
“Ready to kill me and Pamela and take Jericho, you mean.”
“That’s not true.” A gesture, both palms open. “Please, try to calm down. You’re making me nervous with that thing.”
“Sit down.”
“We don’t have time for these games, Beck.”
Rebecca pointed toward the refrigerator and pulled the trigger. She had guessed, correctly, that she could not miss so large a target. “Sit,” she snapped, waving the pistol.
The librarian sat. “Happy now?”
“I should kill you,” Beck muttered. Her hand was aching. She had forgotten how powerful the recoil was.
“You can’t shoot me, Beck.”
Rebecca’s hand trembled, but she kept the gun trained center-mass. “You blew up your friend. I’d shoot you in two seconds.”
A look of pain flitted across the dark face. “You’re wrong. That wasn’t me.”
“Bullshit.”
“Give me the gun.”
“Don’t move.”
But Maxine was not moving. She remained in the chair, hands spread wide in entreaty. “Beck, listen to me. Please. There isn’t a lot of time. This isn’t your world. These aren’t your rules. You can still get out of this, but you’re going to have to put the gun down.”
“No.”
“I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
“You can’t hurt me. I have the gun.”
“Wrong.” Something happened very fast, a flicker, a flurry, a pain, a wild shot, and then Beck was on the floor, cradling her wrist, and Maxine was standing over her. “I have the gun.”
(iv)
With Maxine in charge, they trooped into the security room. The assassin insisted. There was something she wanted Beck to see.
“Why don’t you shoot me and get it over with?”
“Stop talking nonsense.” She pointed. “Here. This monitor. See it?”
Beck stared, fear and fury mingling. “I see, you bitch. I see the van you blew up with your friend inside.”
“Look closer. By the right rear wheel.”
She looked closer. Then looked again. Without the floodlights, it was harder to see anything, but bits of the fire still smoldered, and something dark and slim—
Was that what it looked like?
“What is this?” She swung around, only to find Maxine several paces back and the gun level between them. “What are you showing me? That you blew Audrey’s leg off?”
“It’s not Audrey’s leg, Rebecca. It’s attached to a body. The body belongs to the man who blew her up.”
Beck swung around to look again.
“I wasn’t gentle,” the librarian admitted. “Usually I try to make it painless. But, as you said, he blew up my friend.”
A chilly moment as this image settled between them.
“Who is he?” said Beck. “Was he?”
“Nobody. Hired help. He’s not the point, Rebecca. The point is, we have to get out of here.”
“We?”
“Just you and I, I’m afraid. Mr. Ainsley and his daughter will have to wait a while. We can’t carry baggage.”
“Why am I so important?”
“Just come with me, Rebecca. Please.”
“How are we going to get out?”
“The same way I got in.”
“I’d like to check on Jericho first.”
“Sorry, honey. No time.”
CHAPTER 36
The Decision
(i)
Maxine made Beck go first. They walked down the stairs into the basement. The killer held both the gun and the flashlight. With the power out, even if Beck escaped, she would not be able to see where she was going.
“How did you get into this line of work anyway?” Rebecca asked as they picked their way past the pool table. “A nice librarian like you.”
“Walk slower.”
“I guess there aren’t too many women in your field, are there? You probably get a lot of work. Maybe you could get me in.”
“Relax, Beck. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help you.”
Rebecca snickered. “I should have guessed. All my best friends point guns at me.”
“Down the hall. Slowly.”
The silence was eerie. In a house, one is accustomed to the background whir of equipment, and in a basement especially. With the power cut, there was nothing but their own soft footsteps on the carpet and the skitter of mice.
“You came through the garage,” said Beck, thinking about the pin lights.
“Yes.”
“But the doors are padlocked—”
“Not any more. Now. Slowly. Step into the storeroom.”
This was the chance. There would be only one.
“Jericho said you’re retired.”
“Slow down. You’re walking too fast.”
“If you didn’t kill Audrey,” said Beck, slowing as ordered, “I’m assuming you didn’t shoot Pamela, either.”
“That’s correct.”
She stopped. “You’re saying the sniper is still out there.”
“Presumably. Don’t stop moving. We have to get going.”
Rebecca had both hands on the doorjamb, hesitating as if in fear. Maxine moved very close behind her. “Come on, Beck. You can do this.”
“You don’t know who’s out there.”
“Not entirely. No. All I can tell you is, there are a lot of contenders for the prize Mr. Ainsley has hidden. They were all hanging back. Nobody wanted to set Jericho’s scheme in motion. One of them got impatient, so now all of them have to close in.” She gestured with the gun. “Anyway, we’re safer on the move.”
Beck shook her head. “I want to go back. I can’t leave them.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“Please.”
It had to happen. One woman to another. Maxine reached up to lay a reassuring hand on Beck’s shoulder. And Beck, at the same instant, braced her hands against the jamb, bent her knees, and kicked backward as hard as she could. The librarian cried out in surprise and tumbled. Beck was ready for this, too. Her fingers were curled around the three buttons set inside the door. As soon as she was sure Maxine was on her back, she pressed the buttons.
The gate came thundering down.
The killer was trapped behind it.
Beck ran up the stairs, waiting for the gunshot.
Maxine bellowed, demanding to be released, warning Rebecca that she would never make it on her own, but she never fired. Beck slipped into the garage, slammed the door behind her, and cycled the lock.
(ii)
She was back in the garage. No light of any kind, not from below, not from outside, and Maxine had the flashlight. Beck hated darkness but had no choice. She ran across the concrete floor, bumping into one crate after another, before finally finding her way to a door. She shoved. Nothing happened.
Still locked.
She tried the next, and it gave. She stepped out into the night air and did her sums.
First: Max was trapped but Beck did not know for how long. The night had already been full of surprises, and Maxine had been responsible for a number of them. The assassin was, by all accounts, good at her job. At best, Jericho’s little trap would only slow her down.
Second: There was a sniper out there. If the sniper spotted her, she was finished. Still, he had fired from the north side of the house, and the garage was to the southeast, so there was a fair chance that Stone Heights itself would protect her.
Third: She knew where she had to go. The key was in the question Jericho kept asking her, repeating his demand so that she would sense its importance, but at the same time the listeners would not. He had asked her why Audrey left the family business, and each successive iteration of the question had embedded more and more mention of her husband. As though she had left because of her husband. Her husband had been Ted Gould. Now Beck understood the research. He had been planning all along for the moment when he would have to tell-without-telling. But Rebecca knew, because Jericho had printed the information from the Internet.
Gould just happened to be the name of the nation’s leading maker of well pumps. Pamela said her father had changed the well pump. One of the documents from Jericho’s folder explained how to get a pump out of the well. She had it in her jacket now.
From the architectural plans, she knew that the well was located in
the ravine to the southeast of the house. She had to cross the lawn. With the brush cut back fifty yards on every side, she would be a sitting duck. But she had no choice. She took a breath, looked around into the starry night, and, giving a prayer of thanks that the power outage had killed the floodlights, ran for the woods.
(iii)
She made it to the well; but getting there was the easy part.
Now she had to get the pump out.
The well was simply a hole in the ground, less than a foot in diameter, drilled as far down as necessary to reach the water. The pump was attached to the end of a heavy-duty hose, and the hose was lowered into the well. Above ground, all that was visible was the wellhead, a metal cylinder protruding just a few inches above the ground.
Stooping, she tried to pull off the top with her hands, but she had no leverage; besides, the metal was freezing. The fallen branches she tested as levers all broke. Finally, she was able to pry it off by shoving a flat rock beneath the edge and hammering it with another.
With the top aside, she peered in. She had no flashlight, but she remembered the schematics. The hose took a sharp turn, entering the house through a pipe set a few inches beneath ground level. She slid her hand in and grasped the hose. The rubber was freezing.
She began to pull.
The first couple of tugs were easy. The next couple were not too bad. After that, all of a sudden, the work was backbreaking. Beck had apparently just drawn out the slack. Removing the hose was another matter.
She tested several methods before deciding that the most efficient was to brace herself, one foot against the wellhead, the other flat on the frozen earth, and tug, hand over hand.
Rebecca tugged, and breathed, and tugged, and breathed. Little by little, the hose was coiling on the ground. It was so heavy that half the
time it tugged back, and she lost part of what she had removed. She rested, and then, with a great moan, went back to work. She had mittens in the pocket of her jacket, but they were wool, not meant for manual labor. They did little to protect her from the chill of the hose, and very soon began to unravel. Her hands were chapping, and after fifteen minutes or so, she could no longer feel her fingers. But she kept on tugging. She had no choice. Sooner or later, the sniper would come, or the commandos would come, or Max would get loose. She had to get her hands on Jericho’s secrets before anybody else did. She needed to protect her daughter. She kept tugging for Nina’s sake, and sometimes to show her mother that she could do it. She kept tugging because she could not get back the wasted years. Jericho was right. She was ambitious, so ambitious there were indeed days when she could scarcely bear to look at herself in the mirror. She had to have whatever was at the end of the hose. So she kept tugging. She thought of all the jerks she had dated, and the jerk she had married, and tugged harder. This one for her ex-husband, this one for Jericho, this one for Sean, this one for Pete Mundy, this one for the wide receiver whose nose she broke freshman year.
Rebecca rested a bit, and tried to figure out how much she had pulled out of the well. The hose was coiled everywhere. Her palms were sore. Her fingers were swelling. Her shoulders ached. The books said the hose for a well could easily run five hundred feet, sometimes more, depending on where the water was.
Five hundred feet was nearly a tenth of a mile. She wondered how much a tenth of a mile of hose weighed.
A lot.
She took a break and leaned against a tree. She tugged off her mittens and sucked on her fingers, trying to get some sensation back into them. She looked up at the house. She wished she were in there, except that it was a death trap. Pamela and Jericho, like Nina and Beck herself, had only one chance, and it lay hidden at the bottom of the well.
Back to work.
She looked at the hose laid out on the forest floor. The looped black
shadow seemed to go on for miles, but was probably no more than a few hundred feet. Beck had read that usually a team of two or even three is sent when the hose needs to be pulled up. Unfortunately, her only choice was to be a team of one.
She tugged and rested, tugged and rested, reminded herself that Jericho had once loved her, and that she still owed him, no matter what Dr. Eisenstadt thought. She conjured Nina’s shining face, and the cynicism of a Jack Notting, who would get someone to kill a dog exactly like the one her daughter had been given. Tugging and resting, tugging and resting, Beck thought about Sean, and marveled at the enormity of the enmity that would so turn son against father. And she wondered whether, had Maggie Ainsley not come along to recruit him, Sean would have found some other excuse to play his dangerous game—
A massive explosion shook the forest.
Beck screamed. Animals that had been invisible ran in panic. Up on the hill behind her, the garage was in flames.
She forgot the hose for a moment, forgot the pump, forgot everything as she scrambled up the frozen verge, needing to know whose life had just been incinerated. At the top of the rise, she saw the garage ablaze and, in a panic, stumbled toward it, not away, until Pete Mundy brought her down in a flying tackle.
“Sorry I’m late,” he puffed, sitting beside her on the frozen ground.
(iv)
She hugged him for longer than was decent, and probably kissed him, but later could never remember the exact details.
“What are you doing here?” she managed at last.
“Got a call about suspicious traffic. It all seemed headed this way. You were supposed to get in touch if there were problems, but I hadn’t heard a word, so I took a chance.” He glanced over her shoulder. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?” He pointed at the snow. “You left footprints. Pretty easy to follow.”