Thorne’s big, chrome-plated. 45 was drawn and ready to shoot as he charged into the hallway. “What the hell is going on!”
Nick took off his respirator and nodded toward Jake. “It’s like I feared,” he said softly. “The bones weren’t human.”
Jake’s face was a mask of anguish as he looked up to face the other men. “I killed my son,” he gasped, “and I sent my wife away to prison for the rest of her life.” He took a deep, labored breath before he could finish the thought. “For a dog.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Travis had had some wild dreams before, but nothing like this. It was all about pain. He was floating somewhere, he thought, but every time he tried to move, he couldn’t. The more he tried, the more it hurt.
People were here in the darkness with him. They talked a lot, but they didn’t make any sense. Lots of voices, but no one had a face. They talked in jibberish; about things he’d never even heard of. That was okay, he supposed, but why did it have to hurt so much?
His dick hurt. Somewhere, in the wildest parts of this dream, he remembered one of the faceless people jamming something into him down there. Something big. Not right, he thought, but then lost the thread of why he should object.
Drifting… He felt himself spreading out, traveling somehow. Over there-what was that?
Someone had set his lungs on fire. The fire got bigger every time he took a breath. Just like blowing on hot coals. Take another breath, burn another hole in your lung. That didn’t make any sense at all.
Not when he could just stop breathing.
No more breaths for Travis, then. When they stopped, the pain would stop, too.
But he breathed again, anyway. He told himself to stop, but his lungs wouldn’t listen. They just sucked in another finger of fire; another dose of airborne razor blades.
The image of a snake filled his mind. He hated snakes. This one was big, too. It had slithered all the way up his body and down his throat, doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him, forcing him to breathe when he didn’t want to. Hissing and biting his lungs with every breath.
I’m sorry, he said silently to the snake. I’m sorry for whatever I did. Just stop hurting me, and I’ll be good.
The snake bit him again, a big chunk this time, and the pain brought tears to his eyes. Maybe he should just give up. But he didn’t know how.
Jake felt drugged, like he was living someone else’s life. The others had escorted him back to the parlor and deposited him in a chair, but he was only distantly aware of his surroundings. There’d always been hope before. There’d always been that glimmer of a plan-the one they could pursue when everything else had collapsed around them. They’d always had each other.
Family first…
Now it all seemed a horrible mockery. They’d never been in control at all. Whoever had put all of this together had built an airtight box around them, ruined them. Killed his son. Now there was only emptiness. Now there was only guilt.
And no one else seemed to see the helplessness of it all. Nick kept asking him what they were going to do next, treating him like he was still the leader of this operation. Didn’t he understand that without Carolyn and Travis behind him, leadership meant nothing? Nick couldn’t seem to grasp the obvious fact that there was no next. This had been it, all along. This was as far as the plan was ever designed to take them. He realized now just how ridiculous the gamble had been. He’d bet everything- everything- on a single roll of the dice, and he’d lost.
He felt the panic building again within his gut, but this time he didn’t think he’d be able to stop it.
“Jake, snap out of it!” Nick yelled. His frustration raised his voice an octave. “You’ve got your whole lifetime to feel sorry for yourself. Right now we’ve got some planning to do!”
“He’s useless,” Thorne said from his perch in the doorway. “He can’t handle all this.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nick growled. “Well, he’d better handle it.” He put his hand on the top of Jake’s head and rotated his face up high enough to make eye contact. “You’re pissing me off, Jake! No one disputes that you’ve had a horrible goddamn day, but you’re not the only one waist-deep in a shit bog here. We got caught, pal. All of us. There were witnesses. I might have gotten into this for different reasons than you, but-”
Jake twitched suddenly, as if something had startled him, and his eyes cleared. He clutched Nick’s hand.
“What is it?” Nick asked, pulling away a little.
Jake was still struggling to connect the dots. “You’re right,” he said haltingly. “We… we got caught. How did we get caught?”
Nick scowled and cocked his head. “ How? The cops found us. I guess when we snipped the fence, we made a bell ring somewhere.”
Jake waved him off. “No,” he said. That explanation wouldn’t work. “You said that the response would come from a rent-a-cop. But this was a real cop.”
“It’s not like you haven’t been in the news, ace,” Thorne scoffed. “So they increased their security. They were probably expecting you.”
They didn’t see it yet. “Exactly, Thorne. They were expecting us. But why? Why on God’s green earth would they ever expect us to go back there? If they really think that we blew the place up back in ’83, that’d be the last place they’d expect us to go. I mean, what would be our rationale? Christ, if I had a brain in my head, I’d be in Arizona by now!”
“I’m not getting your point,” Nick said. His expression, however, showed curiosity.
“Somebody was expecting us to go back there,” Jake repeated, frustrated by his inability to make them understand. “They were waiting for us to go back. Something we’d never do if we were guilty.”
Nick frowned. “But even if someone knew you were innocent, why would they assume your play would be to go back there-especially after all this time? Remember, the hide-a-corpse theory was all in our minds.”
“Maybe they didn’t see the Newark move at first,” Thorne said, thinking. “But if there was a trip wire-I mean, if they were concerned you might go back, maybe they took precautions.”
Jake wrestled with the trip-wire idea. “You think maybe the guy who framed us is someone local? Someone who has plenty of eyes and ears around Newark and got wind of our entering town?”
Thorne was indignant. “No way. It was a clean insertion.”
Nick was lost in thought. A trip wire has to be tripped. Was there something there? “Maybe,” he said at last, “we left an electronic trail of some sort.”
Jake considered it for a moment, then dismissed it. “How, though? It’s not like we bought plane tickets to get here or used a credit card for lunch.”
Nick played a word association game in his head, trying to connect “electronic” with the events of the past two days. Just recently, he’d had to search his memory for a password… Now, what was that for?
He remembered. “Oh, shit! The computer file!” Nick smacked his forehead with his palm. “I had to log on to the computer back in Washington to get the records on the Newark site. When I accessed it, I rang a bell. Someone heard it. Given the timing of it all, they must have figured we were coming back. Dammit!” He stomped the floor.
“That’s it,” Jake said.
Nick hung his head low and rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, God, Jake, I’m sorry. I should have-”
Jake waved the apology off as ridiculous. “How could you have known? Who would ever suspect…” He stopped in midthought. His eyes grew wide as an even larger idea formed. Is it even possible? “Holy shit, that’s it!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Nick and Thorne said the word together.
Jake thought his heart was going to explode, and he held his hands out in front, palms forward, to calm himself down. Completely gone was the self-pity of minutes before. In its place, rising excitement. “Okay,” he said, setting himself to begin. He might as well have said, On your mark…