Malevolent (37 page)

There. He’d said it. Possibly getting the Applegate family and several innocent parishioners killed. But they were words, and he needed words to fill too much dead space.

It didn’t make too much sense, but Tim figured it wouldn’t have to sound rational to a man with paranoid delusions. Vincent was already convinced that the world was out to get him, so this “confession” fit right in.

Vincent absently ran his tongue over his lips, while Tim listened to the howl of the wind as it nearly masked a woman’s rage-filled voice out of nowhere and everywhere.

“Die, you bitch, like I died.”

What? Vincent acted like he hadn’t heard it.

Tim’s thoughts went to Patty for some reason. Something flickered in the corner of his vision, a blur of maroon or burgundy, but he didn’t dare break eye contact with the gunman.

“You’re lying,” Vincent said flatly. “There was no one else in on this.”

Maybe he wasn’t as irrational as he’d seemed. But it was too late for Tim to switch directions. Now he had to proceed as if every word, every gesture was a bomb that might explode in his face.

He shrugged. “Fine. Then shoot me. They win.”

“Get her, you bastard.”

A shout, a scream from somewhere and nowhere and everywhere, but a scream he could barely hear. The wind outside the door, it had become a gathering storm, but Vincent seemed as unaware of it as the semivisible woman’s fury.

Tim took a nonchalant step back, in the direction of the side aisle. Then another. Vincent’s gun waved again.

Tim stopped. He’d gone far enough for now. It would take him another couple steps to reach that aisle and several more before reaching the open double doors to the vestibule. Too far. He had to restrain his urge to run screaming for the exit.

In a light tone that sounded false and unnatural to his ear, he said, “How about that, Vincent? Members of your own church were helping me. Providing alibis, warning when you were nearby, laughing behind your back while I slept with…your wife.”

Almost losing all credibility by forgetting the woman’s name. Or would that have been in his best interest, forcing the armed madman to see his innocence? Probably not.

Tim could almost hear the gunman’s mind working it over as his hands played with the gun.
Kill the adulterer now for his taunts, or let him live long enough to reveal his accomplices?

Tim took another step back, and now he was standing in the side aisle. He wondered if he’d actually see the bullet as it came for him.

“I want names.”

A step toward the door. Vincent matched the step so that they still shared a row of pews between them.

“I want names.”

Tim released a pent-up breath. “There are a lot of them,” he said obliquely.

Another tiny step.

Again he heard the woman in the howling gale that had never ended. It rose and fell outside the church. From the altar. From every corner. No words this time from the woman. Only maniacal laughter.

The shot took him by surprise, raising him off his feet. He blinked. Unhurt. Blood-free. His nerves lifting him like that, not the velocity of the round. He found behind him a hole in the wall from the bullet that had entered so quickly it hadn’t cracked the plaster. “No more stalling,” said Vincent. “I want names.”

“There are eight of them,” Tim said, his mind racing to come up with even a single name. “I only know a few of them personally, but they told me they got help from others.”

Vincent stretched his gun arm as though the extra inches would deliver the bullet quicker. “I’m waiting.”

Hell, if he couldn’t even remember his supposed lover’s first name, he’d have a hard time giving up anyone else. Especially with his mind turned to sludge at the expectation of instant death. He churned through names and faces from his one and only church appearance, the memorial service for—

Yes!

“Travis Kendall,” Tim said. “He was the ringleader. In fact, his guilt was the real reason he killed himself. He couldn’t live with the way he’d betrayed you.”

Travis was beyond vengeance, so Tim was hurting no one. And in his paranoid state, Vincent might think it made perfect sense. Still, Tim needed more names.

“Gina Kendall was involved too,” he said. “Not in as big a way, but…“

He hated the thought of Vincent possibly going after the widow after his own murder, but Gina’s was one of the few names he remembered.

He took two more steps.

“LEAVE US ALONE.”

Unlike the previous snatches of barely overheard conversation under the keening windstorm, this was a sonic boom of a voice that filled the air, shuddered the walls. Even Vincent heard it this time. His brow wrinkled. His eyes and gun hand strayed to the high ceiling.

Tim bolted. He hoped that by the time the reverend returned his attention to him, his mad dash up the side aisle to the big double doorway at the back of the chapel would be successful.

He was sure that another shot had been fired when sound ripped through the air, but it was far too loud for even gunfire in a contained space. It was a cacophony of electronic sound amid a burst of train-speed wind howl that should have loosened the church from its foundation, shattered windows, cracked floorboards.

“THIS SHALL NOT HAPPEN.”

It wasn’t a voice. It was a metallic screech that began like a collision of airplanes and ended prematurely, as if the power had been cut as soon as those final words were spoken.

The wind was dying.

At the back of the chapel, still waiting for the bullet to take him off his feet, Tim’s hand found and groped the wall switch, plunging the room into total darkness. Groping blindly before him, he threw himself out those doors and into the vestibule. He only had a second, two or three, to get out, to get on the other side of that big, protective willow and the darkness beyond. Sudden flashes of red and blue dome lights threw erratic patterns of brightness and dark into the vestibule from the broken window. But he deliberately turned away from the safety of that light, the most difficult decision he’d ever made. But the police could only stop Vincent—not the church itself. In time there’d be another minister, another congregation. They’d be back and so would
it
.

Instead of the front door, he grabbed a doorknob farther down the vestibule wall, twisted it and found himself at the top of a staircase. Down where the bathrooms were. He’d had occasion to visit one on the night of the memorial service, and knew that there was a second set of stairs leading up to another area of the vestibule. Meaning that he couldn’t get trapped down there if Vincent followed.

He took two steps down, and then closed the door nearly shut behind him, leaving just enough of a crack to use the flashes of lighting from the vestibule, which leaked strobe patterns on the dark walls down. He sat on a stair step and peeked into the vestibule. From here, he could also see the swinging kitchen door, the next doorway over. He could slip out the basement door and into the kitchen in seconds. But not as fast as a bullet could reach him.

Where the hell was Vincent?

The small sound from the basement below startled him so that he sucked in air. Jesus, he thought, his limbs heavy with despair, Vincent had sneaked around behind him and now it was all over.

The shots, when they came, were actually a series of sharp slaps, stiletto heels on the concrete floor below.

“Tiiiim,” called out the blonde in a black-lace teddy. She bent a slim finger to hook him, reel him in. “Come down.”

The voice sounded feminine and seductive and hollow. She cocked a bare leg at a provocative angle on a bottom step.

“You’re not mine,” he said flatly. “You’re Griffin’s.”

She ran a hand up her cocked thigh. “I’m yours now, baby.”

Still seated on the stair, he tucked his legs up high under him, as far from contact with the thing at the bottom of the stairs as possible.

“You won’t come down, baby,” she sang out, “I’ll just have to come up.” She bent forward languidly, resting both hands on a step, putting on display an expanse of mouthwatering cleavage. Her flesh was pale, the contrast against the black lace causing a stir in him where he thought nothing could possibly stir at that moment. She placed a stiletto heel on a stair and began to climb, like a cat.

Mesmerized by her steady advance, Tim had to remind himself that she wasn’t real. She couldn’t touch him. He ripped his gaze from her just in time to see Vincent in his line of vision.

He stood stock-still in the vestibule, an erratic shadow profile backlit by strobe lighting. He looked like a sleepwalker with a forgotten gun at his side, its blunt barrel pointed at the floor. His head turned slowly to take in the array of doors before him.

Tim pulled back into deeper shadows, hoping he hadn’t been seen in the inch or so of vertical crack where the door nearly met its jamb.

Thudding footsteps. Both men turned their attention to the front of the building. Tim had to nudge his door slightly to risk a partial view.
 
He saw the knob turning slowly and the door at the church entrance creaking open.

“Get away,” Tim ordered as Melinda Dillon cautiously entered.

The sight of her standing there, like some tiny, hot cop with her hair hanging loose, stance open and arms outstretched and wrapped around a small gun, well, it did things to Tim.

He’d given himself away with the ignored warning, and now the madman had two targets from which to choose. The breath hissed from Tim like escaping steam from an old radiator as he compelled his body to take action, to do something.

When the cold hand clamped tightly around his ankle, he kicked out with a sharp cry. Griffin’s blonde phantom had hold of him with two very real, very cold hands. Tim watched, too horrified to react, as the demon’s skin rippled. Its mouth convulsed and words escaped it.

“THIS SHALL NOT HAPPEN.”

There was nothing human about it, the voice a collision of industrial sounds that boomed through the church, crashed off the walls. With all he had left, Tim yanked his foot from the thing’s dead grasp and scooted up and out. He crashed through the door and took three steps across the darkened vestibule, three charging steps to the kitchen’s swinging door, his only conscious thought—
the fire exit had better be unlocked
.

“Drop your gun,” Melinda yelled behind him, and then the shooting began.

Tim reached the kitchen door as her warning was being issued. He swung it wide so that the entire little room was exposed, the only way his bizarre plan had even the slightest hope of success.

The odor of hissing gas hit him like a wall, his eyes tearing up immediately so that everything took on a filmy, bleary cast. His stomach quivered, sending up to his throat the urge to retch. The fire exit was two steps into the room, and that seemed like two too many. Tim held his arms out before him, palms extended to the height of its crash bar.

The bullet whumped into him as his hands found the bar. The first of many tearing at his flesh if the door didn’t open.

More bullets whined, slapping the walls, clanging into the stove and almost immediately throwing a spark that turned to a fireball as he knew it would.

The steel door grunted open as he crashed into it, and he stumbled into the night, his back feeling the intensity of the growing firestorm and his legs going rubbery and undependable. Just before he had the good sense to slam the metal door shut behind him, Tim heard a
whump
of sound and fury that sucked all of the oxygen out of the galley kitchen behind him.

He pitched to the soft ground where he listened to the muffled roar of the gas-fed fire behind the door at his back.

Chapter Sixty-Four

She found him lying facedown in the church’s backyard, not far from the red-hot steel door. She knelt beside him and placed a hand gently on his cheek. “They’re moving a stretcher back here right now,” she told him quietly. He groaned. Smacked his dry lips. “Big crowd?”

Such an odd question. Melinda nodded, though his face was turned away..

He grunted, groaned as he rose to support his upper body shakily on his elbows. He looked like a baby exhausted from crawling. “Shit,” he muttered to the dirt. “It’s gonna be embarrassing getting wheeled by on a stretcher like this.”

Her eyes fell once more to the blood pooling on him. She had the good sense to say nothing.

“The son of a bitch shot me in the ass,” he said between clenched teeth.

As if that wasn’t obvious. The hole in his khaki shorts was perfectly centered on his left buttock and ringed by a big, red wet spot.

He twisted his neck to catch sight of her, his breath quickening with the effort. “What happened to him? Vincent.”

His question returned Melinda to her own private pain. Her mind raced mercifully fast through the scene she’d never forget.

Entering the church ahead of backup help—a cardinal sin of the department, but she felt she had no choice—encountering an armed Vincent Applegate and ordering him to throw his gun away. Hesitating only a split second as the minister got off several quick shots toward Tim, who’d flitted into the kitchen, and letting go a fusillade of her own as Vincent had wheeled to confront her, gun now pointed her way.