Reflex (44 page)

The maid picked up the silver coffeepot and disappeared.

Then she was splashing the entire pot of coffee onto Thug One and the blonde was slapping at his clothes and falling to one side. Sojee screamed again, but this time it was cut off abruptly as Sojee, and the figure in the maid's uniform, vanished. The empty silver coffeepot fell to the floor with a clank.

Davy staggered, fell off his shins to the side. The room seemed to whirl.
I guess she
can
jump.

He shook his head hard.
Or it's a psychotic break.

He felt packed in cotton, distant, as if he were watching things through thick glass.

But the others were reacting as if it had happened, too. In fact, Simons reaction warmed Davy's heart.

Simons was on his feet, the chair falling back to thump against the wall and fall, sideways, to the floor. "Oh, shit! Shit, shit, shit!" He pulled a gun from inside his jacket and backed into the corner by the two-way mirror. He held the gun out, one hand bracing the other and swiveled his head back and forth, scanning the room.

Thug One climbed to his feet, holding the hot cloth of his shirt and pants away from his skin.

Simons yelled at him. "Get in the other corner and get your gun out! No, not that corner—you want to shoot me? She'll be back for her husband. For God's sake, shoot to kill!"

Millie? It was Millie. They'll
shoot
her!

He clenched his fists and staggered to his feet. The room reeled.
This ends now.

He twinned to the beach, by the trees where the water-filled crater in the sand was still visible. He saw the ghost Simons react to the sudden flood of sunlight across the oak floor.

Simons jerked his gun up and pointed the gun right at Davy.

Fire blossomed from the muzzle and the sound was palpable. Davy gasped, expecting to die, but he heard the bullet hit a branch behind him and tumble, ripping through the underbrush with a harsh buzzing sound.

How could he miss?

Davy shifted several yards out into the ocean and splashed neck deep in water.

But he was also still in the room.

The wave of salt water rushed out of his body in every direction, a torrent flowing through the Davy-shaped hole. The circuit breakers blew as the salt water filled the electrical outlets and the high-mounted emergency light cast a garish glare over the rising water. It filled the room neck deep in two seconds despite pouring out through the open door. The heavy oak wardrobe toppled and bobbed, then wedged against the door. It flooded and sank, damming the door and raising the water higher. Davy moved to deeper water, kicking off the bottom, and the water level in the room rose too.

He saw Simons open his mouth in a scream but it was inaudible over the rushing water. Simons pointed his gun and fired and this time the bullet burned across Davy's shoulder. Then the rising water swept Simons off his feet.

Davy was tugged and pulled, but almost mildly since the water flowed through his body, not against it, completely unlike the cascade of water that swept Simons and the blonde off their feet and squirted them through the doorway into the hall.

Davy ducked his head under and heard the house groaning, shifting, as tons of water filled the third floor hallway and cascaded down the stairway. He put his head back out of the water and shuffled to deeper water, floating higher in the room until only a foot of air space remained below the ceiling. The emergency light showed from below the water for a few seconds then flickered out, shorted by the salt water. He heard something crack and the water dropped abruptly.

The Australian sunlight still poured through him, making the water around him glow and this light, refracted by the dancing surface, flickered across the ceiling. Between the bathroom and the square, the floor had opened up and water was draining through it in a whirlpool, like a toilet flushing.

Into the room where my electronic leash lives.
He took a deep breath.
At least Sojee is free.

The implant triggered. He doubled over, flinching wholly back into the room, into the unlit dark. His body, now subject to the roaring waters, spun and jerked as the water drained through the floor, but the manacle and chain tethered him, wrenching his knee and hip but keeping him from the hole.

His convulsing body settled to the floor as the last of the water receded, but he wasn't conscious and he wasn't breathing.

There were video cameras in the hall, one at each end. She saw them in the dental mirror she stuck out into the hall.

She frowned. So
who's watching? And where?
She pulled the mirror back and hoped it hadn't shown on the camera.

She felt intensely frustrated—all the work she'd done to get this far and it was a dead end. She thought about going back onto the roof but every window she could reach on this level would still open out onto the hall and its cameras.

She heard steps on the stair and then in the hall. Her first impulse was to jump away before the person got to this room—if they were coming to this room—but then she'd have to come back. She'd need to know if the room was empty or not.

And maybe you can find out something.

She positioned herself against the wall, behind the door. The person
was
coming to this room. They weren't. They were. Hope and fear collided, grappled, surged back and forth like sumo wrestlers. The doorknob rattled and turned and the door swung in.

A woman in one of the gray uniforms flipped on the light and, when she then turned to push the door shut behind her, saw Millie. She jumped, startled, and took a sharp intake of breath to scream or cry out.

Millie fired pepper foam directly into the woman's face and open mouth. The incipient scream never emerged, instead she produced a desperate choking sound. Still, the woman kicked out toward Millie and Millie jumped away, to the Aerie, just in time to avoid the foot. Teeth set, Millie jumped back to the room.

The maid was on her knees now, groping for the doorknob. Tears were streaming down her face, cutting the white foam, but she clearly couldn't see and, from the wheezing noise, could barely breathe. Millie felt sorry for her but she couldn't let her alert the household. She grabbed her by the collar and jumped to the inky darkness of the island at the bottom of the pit, then pushed her to splash ankle deep into the shallows.

"Wash it off," she said.

From behind Millie a woman's voice cried out, "Who's there?"

Millie flinched away to the Aerie.

What the hell?

She jumped to the rim of the pit, above the island, and flipped the night vision goggles down. There were three figures down there. The maid on her knees in the shallows, splashing water over her face, and two others huddled on the other side of the island. She jumped back down to the island, to the center, crouching in a small gap in the brush, screened by a mesquite bush.

She stood enough to see over the brush but couldn't really see the man's face. He sat, both hands covering his mouth and nose, but now she could make out the other woman's features clearly—it was the woman from the National Gallery, the one Becca Martingale had identified. She had a gun in her hand and kept it pointed across at the splashing sounds, though the arms shook visibly.

Davy put them here.

She felt sobs trying to surface and she ruthlessly choked them back.
Cry after he's home!

The maid stopped splashing and the woman with the gun tried again. "Who's th-there?" The woman was shivering so badly it distorted her voice.

The maid's voice was a weak rasp. "Is that you, Miss Pope?"

"Who are you?"

"It's Agnes, Miss Pope. The upstairs maid."

"Wh-what's wrong with your va-voice?"

"They used pepper spray on me."

"Who di-did? David?"

Millie held her breath.

"No ma'am. It was someone else. They were in my room when I got there. They wore a dark mask and they had night vision goggles flipped up on their forehead. Not Mr. Rice."

He
is
in that house!

"And they pu-put you here."

"Yes, ma'am. It was a woman's voice."

"Oh. Right. I heard her. D-do you have a lighter, Agnes? We're soaked. It's been hours and we n-need a fire."

"Uh. No, ma'am. But I have my Beretta," Agnes wheezed. "One could start a fire with the muzzle blast, if the kindling were prepared."

"I d-didn't think of that."

Pope... that's right—Hyacinth Pope. She doesn't sound like she's thinking too clearly. Chilled—on the edge of hypothermia. Davy dropped them into the water—just like old times.

Millie studied Agnes. The maid had climbed laboriously to her feet and she pulled up her skirt. She had a holster strapped to her thigh—the skirts were full enough to conceal it—and she drew her gun. Her hair was cut long along her jaw line and got shorter in back and she was about Millie's height and weight.

Millie studied Agnes's hair again, then jumped away before they started firing their guns about, trying to make fire.

In the Aerie, she took her brown wig, the one she'd bought to make herself look like the old Millie, and trimmed, cutting quickly, doing a rough approximation of Agnes's hair. Then she jumped back to the maid's room and, door locked, changed into one of the clean uniforms, arranged the white apron, positioned the wig, and stowed the atropine autoinjectors in the apron pocket. Clenching the pepper foam in one hand she stepped out into the hall.

She walked placidly along, trying to match the tempo of the footsteps she'd heard when Agnes had come down the hallway. It took an enormous effort not to look up at the camera as she passed into the stairwell.
They'll see what they expect to see.

I hope.

She took the stairway all the way down to the basement, thinking about dungeons and manacles and dank, dark cells. With every step her heart pounded harder and her breath came in shallower and shallower little gasps. Instead of cells she found storerooms and pantries, a walk-in freezer, and a small apartment.

Occupied.

A man in chef's whites lounged in a recliner reading the paper. He glanced up as the door opened. "Yes, Agnes? Why didn't you knock?" His eyes widened. "You're not Agnes!"

Millie nearly flinched away, taking a step back.

The man reached for an intercom phone beside his chair.

Millie jumped across the room and kicked the side table aside, crashing the phone to the floor. The man in white struggled to rise but the recliner was locked back. Millie lifted the footrest and the chair tilted easily and inevitably back, spilling the man over on his neck in a crash. As he struggled upright, she coated his face with pepper foam.

Ten seconds later he was splashing in the shallows of the island in the pit.

Millie didn't tarry. The previous prisoners had managed their fire and Millie jumped away from its flickering light like a vampire fleeing the sun. But she returned immediately, to the rim above, to watch them investigate the new arrival—hoping they wouldn't shoot him by accident.

The voices drifted up, thin and distant.

"It's Harvey," said Agnes. "The cook."

A man's voice, nasal, as if he had a bad head cold, said, "Don't touch his face, you'll get it on you!"

Hyacinth had found Padgett's sleeping bag and clutched it around her, Indian style. She crouched before the fire and said listlessly, "Go on, Harvey. Rinse it off." She barely looked up.

Millie tried to return to Harvey's apartment but couldn't picture it well enough. After taking several deep breaths and feeling her heart slow, she finally managed the basement hallway at the foot of the mansion's stairs.

So, if Davy's not in the basement, he's probably not on the ground floor either.

She took one step past the first floor and turned back.
Better be sure.

This floor matched the exterior, everything she imagined when she thought of mansions—high ceilings, chandeliers, antique furniture, broad expanses of space. She didn't run across anyone until she entered the smaller hallway off the main wing.

The man wore a cutaway coat, a picture out of a depression-era film or an MGM musical, and he carried himself like the king of the world as he walked out of the kitchen.

He took one look at her and said, "You've put the apron on wrong. The lower edge should be two inches above the dress hem. And we don't carry objects in that pocket. It's
decorative."

Millie blinked and stopped while he was still eight feet away. Her palms sweated and she shifted her grip on the pepper foam, concealed behind a fold in the skirts. She wondered if he had a gun and where he kept it.

He bowed slightly. "How may I assist you, Madam?"

"I'm looking for—"
my husband
"—Mr. Rice. What floor is he on?"

His face didn't change an iota. "I'm sorry, Madam, there's no one of that name here. May I show you the door?"

She shook her head. "I've already talked with Harvey and Agnes and Hyacinth. I know otherwise."

"Well," he said, and moved like a striking snake.

Apparently this man didn't need a gun. For Millie it felt as if something exploded in the region of her stomach and she found herself flying through the air. She suspected she was still rising when she jumped away.

She fell to the floor in the Aerie, her mouth gaping. Something was terribly wrong with her lungs.
He'll raise the alarm.
She jabbed her fist into her own diaphragm, then raised both her arms. The pepper foam clattered on the floor and she snatched at it.

The first breath wheezed back into her lungs and she jumped.

He wasn't in the hall and she thought he'd run to some other part of the house, but then she heard footsteps from the kitchen. She jumped down the hall and saw him through the kitchen door, going across toward an intercom.

She was already spraying the foam when she appeared five feet in front of him and he
still
almost got her. This time, though, she was ready. His foot passed through empty air and she appeared three feet to his other side, still spraying. His head began to look like a white puff ball. He lashed out again and she jumped to the far side of the room, willing to wait for the foam to do its work.