The One That Got Away (32 page)

He’d been sloppy when dealing with the cop’s arrival. He’d left the stool in front of her. It wasn’t underneath her, but it was within reach. Arms and shoulders screaming in pain, she stretched her leg out, hooked her big toe under the seat, and pulled it back. She had to be careful. The dirt floor was soft and uneven. If it toppled, it was over. She was dead. She inched the stool toward her and its feet cut into the soft dirt, making it list to one side. She froze, keeping it upright with her other foot.

“Please don’t fall,” she murmured.

The stool listened, staying upright until it was under her. It was a small victory. While she could get her feet flat on the stool, it wasn’t tall enough to help her clear the top of the hook. She stood on tiptoes and was an inch too short.

Just a small jump to freedom
, she told herself.

She jumped up with everything she had, swinging her leaden arms forward, and swung free of the hook. She landed awkwardly and toppled forward, hitting the ground with a thud.

The sudden rush of blood back into her arms was both exhilarating and excruciating, far outweighing the sensation of hitting the ground. She wanted to revel in the moment, but there was no time. Hands still shackled together, she pushed herself to her feet and darted over to the stable door.

She peered out. She’d heard gunshots, so she expected to see Beck dead. Not this. The cop lay on his back, blood everywhere and not moving, while Beck slumped over his damn dog, sobbing. Her rescue was in tatters. It was all down to her now.

Beck had screwed up by killing a cop. That screwup might have just saved her life. They’d sent the cop for a reason. When he didn’t report back, they’d send more. With any luck, they’d be here soon. She just had to stay out of Beck’s clutches until then.

That wasn’t going to be easy. She was naked, alone, and unarmed, but she had one thing going for her—hope. A rescue had to be a half hour away at most. She could survive that long.

“You can do this,” she murmured. “You won’t die today.”

She looked past the scene at the dirt road to freedom. A straight run for it was the simplest answer, but she’d never make it. Escape wasn’t the answer, hiding until the cops arrived was. One thing this place had in spades was places to hide.

Beck climbed to his feet, wiping tears from his face. She had to act now, or her reprieve would be over. She backed away from the door, tore through the stable, and out the back entrance. Tall grass covered everything except for a horse trail leading to the tree line on the far side of the property. If she kept to the path, he’d spot her, but she could hide in the grass.

She took off left toward the paddock Beck had marched her through earlier. She ran with her shackled hands pressed to her chest. It helped her balance and protected her naked body from the sharp, dry blades of grass.

“Zoë,” came Beck’s bellow from inside the stable.

She stopped running and dropped to her knees, letting the foliage conceal her. She looked back at the stable. Beck emerged, knife in hand.

“Don’t think you can escape me again, Zoë.” He paused as if waiting for an answer.

Sweat ran down her back into the open wounds. She winced but bottled a moan.

He scanned the landscape for her. Her breath was fast and ragged, but she remained as still as she could. The grass was her greatest friend and her worst enemy. Any movement, and it would give her away.

His gaze passed over her position and kept going. He didn’t have a clue where she was. That was good. All she had to do was stay a step ahead of him until the cavalry came.

He retreated back inside the stable. The second he was gone, she ran again. She kept low, below the level of the grass, to remain unseen. She kept zigging and zagging to hide her path but always headed in a direction that put more and more distance between herself and the stable.

“Oh, Zoë,” he yelled.

Again, she dropped to her knees and held fast. He reemerged from the stable, carrying something in his hand. He strode back toward the dead cop.

“Do you know how you find a needle in a haystack?”

The randomness of the question confused her.

“No? Well, I’ll tell you. You set fire to the hay.”

Fear knifed through her. He was going to burn her out. She peered at the thing in his hand. It was a gas can with a hose. He stopped next to the patrol car. He was going to siphon the tank.

He wouldn’t need much fuel to get a fire started. Once it took hold, the bone-dry vegetation would do the rest. She needed a new hiding spot. The house looked like the best bet. She was closer to it than he was. It might have things she needed—a phone, clothes, water—and it was shelter. She could barricade herself in, at the very least, and rely on the house’s ability to survive a fire in the short term. Short-term solutions were her primary drive. She just had to stay alive long enough for the police to arrive.

She looked over at Beck. He was funneling the tube into the gas tank, not watching for her. She broke into a run, aiming straight for the house.

The grass stopped short of the dwelling, and she dropped to her belly when she reached the edge of her cover. She looked the place over. The last thing she needed was it to be some sort of trap. It looked like what it was—an abandoned house. She wouldn’t know if there was anything wrong with it until she got inside.

She pushed herself up and looked back at Beck. He was still busy siphoning the patrol car’s tank. Staying low, she darted over to the building and kept going until she reached the back porch. She dropped to her butt and leaned against the wall with her shoulder.

It was time to lose the shackles. If he’d shackled her with the cable ties he’d used earlier, she would have needed a knife to get through them, but he’d used the leather cuffs, held together with a steel ring. A strap with a buckle cinched the restraints tight. She worked the band free with her teeth, then bit down on it, pulling it tight to release the prong. With her newly liberated hand, she undid the other.

Getting to her feet, she gingerly massaged her bruised wrists and went to the back entrance. She tried the knob. It was locked. It wouldn’t take much to break one of the door panes but she needed something to deaden the noise. She found an ancient feed sack and put it up to the glass. She’d been taught that the elbow was the strongest bone structure in the body in her defense classes, so she put it to the test. She drove it into the center of the pane. The impact sent a crackle of fire through her arm, all the way to her fingers, but the move worked. The pane fractured into three shards, tumbling into the house. She grabbed the knob and let herself in.

The kitchen smelled stale, the air bottled. It had to be years, if not decades, since someone had opened up this place. A thick layer of dust covered every surface. Her feet were the first in a long while to disturb its abandonment. The stable might have been Beck’s special place, but the house wasn’t.

She went to the living room. It was furnished but had been left to rot. She lifted the receiver of a rotary dial phone. She wasn’t surprised that she didn’t get a dial tone.

“Don’t worry, the cops are coming,” she said to herself.

If this place had been left exactly how it had been years ago, there’d be clothes. She cut back through the kitchen and toward the bedrooms. She opened the first door on her left and her breath caught in her throat.

Unlike the kitchen and the living room, this room was bare—no furniture, no possessions, nothing. There wasn’t even carpeting or hardwood, just bare boards. The room contained only two things—graffiti on the walls, and something she could only describe as a pillory.

The pillory was crude and obviously homemade. It was T-shaped, with straps at the ends of the crossbeam for the hands and a chin rest where the crossbeam and the post met. It was low to the ground, meaning a person would have to kneel when strapped into it. Then, in horror, she realized it wasn’t just low to the ground—it was child-size. The sight of it sickened her and in the cloying, stale air of the house, she wretched.

If she thought this was where Beck had plied his trade, the graffiti daubed across the walls proved his innocence. In big, clumsy letters, someone had written: THIS IS WHERE DISRESPECTFUL CHILDREN LEARN RESPECT. It had been painted haphazardly, almost like a person signing a cast on someone’s arm. There were dozens of names written on the walls, as well. Beck’s name was among them. Next to each, there was one other detail. If she hadn’t been scarred by him, she would have mistaken the markings as meaningless gibberish, but she knew better. They were Roman numerals. Every child had them. Next to Marshall Beck’s name was
XX
.

That didn’t signify his number in the order of punishment. She could see where the numerals had been painted over and repainted many times. Beck wasn’t the twentieth child. He’d been punished in this room twenty times.

In this room, a monster had spawned a monster. In this room, the Tally Man had been created.

“Zoë!” Beck yelled again, his voice muffled by distance and glass. “It’s time to burn.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Marshall Beck touched the lighter to the small trail of gasoline. It ignited immediately, and an orange flame chased along the ground and into the grass. The tinder-dry vegetation caught without effort. The blades withered and turned black in seconds. As each one burned, it ignited the ones around it. The fire moved with a speed he found satisfying.

He knew he was being reckless. He should be running, not lighting fires, but he had too much invested in Zoë to give up now. He couldn’t let her escape punishment again. It was her time to die, today, now, even if it cost him everything.

He laid the fuel trails every ten yards or so, to either side of the dirt road. He went to each one and lit them to create an ever-expanding avenue of fire.

“No hiding from this, Zoë,” he murmured.

Once the fire took hold, he tossed the gas can, with the remaining fuel inside, into the training paddock. When the flames caught up with it, it would serve as an additional booster to keep the blaze going.

The fire moved swiftly, reaching both paddocks in minutes. The heat radiating off the pastures forced him to the center of the road.

He didn’t fear the inferno. Grass was a weak fuel for a sustained blaze. There’d be only superficial damage, and it would burn itself out quickly enough. But destruction wasn’t the point of this exercise. The fire just needed to last long enough to flush Zoë out. She’d been smart to hide in the grass. He could have spent all day hunting her and gotten nowhere. The flames would speed up their reunion. He just hoped they didn’t trap her and kill her—that wasn’t in the plan. She needed to die on his terms, after paying for her transgressions.

He jogged up and down the dirt road, from the stable to his Honda and back. He watched for movement and listened for cries, but found it hard to detect anything through the flames and towering smoke. It was providing her with unintended cover.

Then he realized a bigger mistake. He’d miscalculated. Instead of the fire driving Zoë toward him, it would drive her away from him. Worse still, it would push her into the protective cover of the tree line. He should have started the fire from the periphery to force her to the middle. He took solace in the fact that if she wanted to reach civilization, she’d have to come back to the dirt road. As long as he remained here, she couldn’t escape. If she wanted out, she had to come through him.

Beck disappeared behind a wall of smoke and shimmering flame, unnerving Zoë. She wanted him in full view, but took comfort in the knowledge that if she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see her either. That meant she could move with the same freedom that he did.

The blaze chased across the paddock toward her. She guessed that it would be twenty minutes before the surrounding pastures would be totally engulfed.

C’mon, cops. You’re taking too damn long
.

She could wait it out here. The house was quite a ways from the main fire and solidly built, so she’d probably be safe from the flames for a while. But she didn’t think Beck would be so patient.

She couldn’t wait for the cops. They could be around the corner or fifty miles away. She needed to get to Beck’s SUV and bust out of here. But Beck wasn’t dumb. He’d be expecting her to try something, so she’d have to distract him. There had to be something in this house she could use.

The house was vast, with six bedrooms and several bathrooms. She went from room to room, searching for something, anything to divert his attention. After experiencing the punishment room, she feared what she’d find in the other bedrooms. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find Norman Bates’s mummified corpse in a rocking chair, and if she had, she would have taken it. It would have made a great body double. But there was just cheerless bedroom after cheerless bedroom. Each housed two to three mattresses, all without box springs. Bare walls greeted her where teen-idol posters should have given the rooms personality and life. Clothes and possessions were absent. Whether they were taken or they never existed, it was impossible to tell. One bedroom was different—the master. That room was a real room, fit for a person—a queen bed, complete with linens, a nightstand, dressers, photographs, paintings, and drapes. Only one thing marred the perfect room—a spray of rust-colored stains covering one wall and the ceiling. Zoë didn’t have to check to know someone had eaten a shotgun at some point in the past. What the hell had gone on in this place?