Muness had no intention of allowing blackmail to rule his life. And Billy had no intention of allowing Muness to rule his.
He was going on the run. Tonight.
WATCHING A cloaked stranger nail her door shut in the middle of the night was enough to stop her lungs from inhaling. Staring into the stranger's shadowed eyes was enough to freeze her heart.
Darcy didn't know if he could see her eyeballs through the gap in the slats, but if he saw movement, he would know she was awake and watching him.
She had to get to the phone!
The man abruptly turned and walked along the wall, then disappeared around the corner. Going where? To seal the back door too?
Darcy released the blinds and ran toward the kitchen. White venetian blinds covered all of the windows in the family room adjacent to the kitchen. From her vantage point, the back door looked undisturbed.
She considered making a run for it now, into the garage, into her Chevy, into the night. But she hesitatedâsurely there was an explanation for all of this. Who'd ever heard of a woman being sealed in her own home by a man with a hammer? If he wanted in, he would have just shattered the door, not nailed it shut.
Run, Darcy! Get out now while you still can.
She ran for the garage door, thinking she should grab a knife just in case. But her urgency to escape, to get out now while she still could, over-powered the desire for a weapon. And she didn't want to alert the intruder by clattering through a drawer full of knives.
She slid her keys off the hook on the back wall and tried the door leading to the garage. Locked. She eased the dead bolt back and shoved again.
No.
Locked
.
She checked the dead bolt again, thinking she'd turned it the wrong way, but the bolt was open. And the door handle twisted in her palm. The door was jammed from the outside.
Gooseflesh rippled on her arms. He'd gotten to the garage door?
Darcy spun around, breathing hard. Her mind was blank. She turned and slammed into the door, grunting, ignoring the pain in her shoulder.
It refused to budge.
The back door! She whirled, took one step, and slipped on the rug in front of the sink. Her arm caught her fall, but not without slapping into the metal sink. Loud.
She scrambled to her feet. The delay in her progress to the back door gave her time to recall her first impulse to call for help. Moving with less concern about stealth, she crossed the kitchen, snatched the phone off the counter, and pressed it to her ear.
It was programmed to engage upon contact with her fingers. But the familiar dial tone was gone. Instead, static.
Darcy punched the manual power button, tried again, and heard the same static.
Now, true panic collided with her mind. He'd cut her phone line!
“Darcy . . .”
His voice came from the direction of her bedroom. Low and long, then again, tasting each syllable.
“Darcy . . .”
He was inside!
She ran for the back door, fumbled with the locks, and discovered exactly what she'd expected to find. A door that would not open.Which left only the windows and the attic.
All that banging from her dreams filled her ears. How long had he been building her house into a prison?
She tore for the nearest window, yanked the blinds up, and saw nothing but black. Black boards. He'd boarded up the windows too.
Darcy whispered frantically under her breath. “No, no, no, no, no!”
“Darcy, Darcy . . .Wanna play?”
She clamped a trembling hand over her mouth.
“There's no way out, honey. I know how to fix a house.”
Access to the attic was in the master bath, and from the sound of it the intruder was between her and the bedroom. She had to let him enter the kitchen area and sneak past him if she hoped to make it.
The attic had a round vent she might be able to squeeze through if she could dislodge it before he found her. She knew this because she'd been up there with a cable repairman, tracking down a cable that a mouse had chewed through. The vent would put her on the roof, but from there she might stand a chance.
She eased to her knees and crawled toward the couch.
“You have to ask yourself if after going to all that trouble . . .”
He was in the kitchen already and she hadn't even heard him move.
“. . . I would be stupid enough to give you a way out. Hmmm?”
Darcy lay flat, shivering. How had he come in? If there was a way in, there had to be a way out.
“You're wondering about the attic?”
Darcy inched forward on her knees again.
“Forget the attic, honey.”
She went then, while the sound of his voice came from the garage area.
Sprinting through the doorway that led to the living room with her five-foot media screen. Scanning the walls for a window he'd left open.
None.
She spun into the master bedroom and saw the opened miniblind beyond her bed. He'd crawled in through the window and shut it behind him. But he hadn't had the time to nail it, right?
“You want out so soon?”His voice was behind her, only feet, it seemed. She'd never make it!
Darcy dived forward, rolled across her bed, and came up airborne.
Behind her the lights came on.
She crashed against the wall next to the open window and fumbled with the latch. Opened it. Pulled the window open.
“Shh, shh, shh . . .” A hand grabbed her collar and jerked her back against his body. “Please, I just want to talk.” Hot breath.
Darcy screamed, but his hand smothered her mouth. She bit into his flesh, felt warm blood rush between her teeth.
He withdrew his hand and slapped something else in its place. Around her head. Tape.
Her muffled cry filled her taped mouth, powerless now. She struggled hopelessly against his steel grip. Like a man who'd won his share of hogtying contests, he secured her wrists behind her back, spun her around, and shoved her to the ground.
The black-clad man strode for the window, shut the blinds, and faced her. His hand was bleeding where she'd bitten him, but he didn't seem to notice.
“Well, well, well. So you would be Darcy, or, as you are so affectionately referred to back in the group, number thirty-five.”
Her assailant stood over six feet, dressed in dark brown slacks and a black collared shirt, a day's stubble lining his jaw. Sweat glistened on his face, but otherwise he looked clean for a man who'd spent the night sealing her in her house.
“Now, just take a deep breath, Thirty-five. I've done this more times than I care to rememberâgets old after a while. We'll be here for a while, a day, maybe more, depending on you.”
He eyed her from head to toe. Grunted. “I really hope you're not the stubborn kind.”
She told him what she thought of him in no uncertain terms, but it came out in a long “Uhummmmmmm!”
“This doesn't have to be difficult,” he said. “You're brimming with questions, and I don't blame you. We'll get to them. Where do you keep the bandages?”
She stared him in the eyes, refusing to clue him in.
“The bathroom, naturally. Just seeing if you were warming up.” He walked to her, grabbed her by her hair, and tugged her to her feet. She stumbled beside him into the living room, where he shoved her onto the love seat.
Producing a pair of cuffs, he cinched one end to her ankle and the other to the sofa leg.
“Be right back. Can I get you anything? Coffee, lemonade, mint tea?”
The man left, banged about in the bathroom for a minute, then returned, hand bandaged in a strip of sterile cotton.
“Problem with giving you a drink,” he said, “is drinking it. If everything they tell me about your yapper is correct, I don't think I'll be taking the tape off any time soon.”
He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with one of her wooden chairs. Spun it around and straddled it.
“You can call me Agent Smith. Not my real name, but it has a ring to it. You like old movies?”He pointed at her. “You, we'll call Darcy. Number thirty-five sounds a bit too clinical. Fair enough?”
She stared at him.
“Good. Now, the first thing you have to understand is that whether I kill you or not depends on how cooperative you are. If it were up to me, I would let you live. You're dangerous, I'm sure, but I think the world needs a bit of danger to make it interesting, and I'm not about to be the only one providing it. Follow?”
She didn't. She was about as dangerous as a mouse. He was mistaking her for someone else. This whole thing was a mistake! Which gave her some hope. If she could make him understand, he might let her go.
“But,” he continued, “they disagree and they call the shots.”He stared at the tape around her mouth. “If you really can do all they say you can, maybe it's best for everyone.”
What was he talking about? She shook her head hard.
Agent Smith slowly smiled. “You really don't know, do you?”
“Hmmmm!” she shouted.
No!
“We'll start with me and then move on to you. You're the prize here, after all.”
Smith stood, withdrew a toothpick from his breast pocket, and began to pick his teeth. “I work for Rome. The Roman Catholic Church. Not as a priest, obviously, but I'm on the payroll. Evidently you have a history they aren't crazy about. A certain monastery in which you and thirty-six other children were sequestered for the first thirteen years of your lives. You remember?”
Long fingers of horror reached around Darcy's throat. Smith had the right girl, then. The nightmare she'd fled all these years had caught up to her. And this time it would finally kill her. Darcy felt hot tears leak down her cheek and drop onto her lap.
“One year ago, one of those children, a man now named Johnny Drake, demonstrated a rather remarkable set of powers that could ultimately embarrass the Catholic Church. Evidently, Johnny wasn't the only one who came into the possession of such powers.”
Not me! You have the wrong person!
But the words refused to form in her frozen throat.
“My mission is a simple one: find the grown children, find out what they really know, and then decide whether they should die.”
She felt herself shiver with a deep-seated rage. Not only against this emissary but also at the institution that had reduced her to a shell of what most people were.
Smith drawled on. “The church is in a bit of a spot as you probably know. Everyone seems to hate her these days. Not without reason, mind you, but there it is. The only group of people more despised than Catholics are Protestants. Used to be Muslims and Hindus and all the Eastern freaks took the cake. Well that's all changed, and as a good Christian solider I feel compelled to do my part in cleaning things up.”
He winked.
“Which brings me here. So then, let's begin. I need to know what you know.” Agent Smith got off the wooden kitchen chair, settled into the leather recliner to the right of the sofa, crossed his legs, lay his head back, and closed his eyes.
“Go ahead, take some time. I'm in no hurry.”
Day Two
BILLY REDIGER left his apartment at two in the morning, climbed into the old cobalt-blue Porsche 911 he'd won in a poker game a few months ago, ignited the engine, and left 2917 Atlantic Street behind for the last time.
At least that was the plan.
He'd made an emergency call to the judge and explained that, however inconvenient it might be for the court, health issues were forcing him to remove himself from the defense of Anthony Sacks. Unless, of course, she was willing to let him present his closing arguments
in absentia
, to be read by the clerk.
After five minutes of chastisement, she agreed to let the clerk read his closing arguments, only because the case against Sacks was so airtight that closing arguments were futile anyway, she claimed.
So much for Anthony Sacks's day in court.
Billy had typed up his closing argumentâwhich took one last stab at confusing the jury by reminding them of their own sinsâsent it to the judge via the Net, packed up his few belongings, and cleared out.
The night was cool and the traffic nearly nonexistent at such an early hour, so he lowered the top, turned up the stereo, and pretended that all was as fine as a sunny Sunday in June.
Truth was, he'd just hit bottom. And even now, the bottom felt like it was about to give way. Muness had long arms, and it would only take him a day at most to figure out that Billy had fled the city and done the only thing that made any sense.
Gone after Darcy. Which in Billy's mind didn't make much sense at all.
According to the online digital map index, Lewistown, Pennsylvania, was two hundred thirty miles from Atlantic City, up the 42 to the 76 to the 22. A good four hours without traffic. With any luck he'd beat the morning rush and arrive before she headed out for the Hyundai plant where she worked, information according to the thoughts of Ricardo Muness.
Billy tried to tap his hand to the beat crackling through the old speakers but couldn't get it right in such a ragged state of mind. He settled for chewing on his fingernail.
Darcy. He wasn't sure how he'd feel seeing her again. Depended if she attempted to bite his head off or not.
Butterflies fluttered in his belly. He'd sworn her off and gone his own way when they were still fourteen, but she'd been his first true love, if indeed love could be found in hell, which was the only way he could succinctly characterize the monastery they'd grown up in. But their experience had forged a bond between them that he could never deny. A part of Darcy had remained with him to this day. Though which part, he wasn't sure.
The thought made him swallow. What did she look like? Was she large, skinny? Had she become a socialite or retreated into a cocoon? Was she married, dating, an ax murderer, into sports? Did she think about him?