“Get out of my way!” Thorne shouted as Melissa tried to block his path.
“He’ll kill her!” she screamed. She grabbed Thorne’s jacket in her fists. “Let him go!”
Thorne settled the issue with a slap that sent Melissa reeling.
Jake stood watching, horrified. He saw Nick’s wife hit the floor shoulder-first and heard her scream in pain. Nick shot him a look of pure hatred as he hobbled over to help her. Jake stared for a moment, absorbing his friend’s anger, but there was nothing to say. He hurried to follow Thorne into the yard.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Out back, the grass gave way quickly to woods; small scrubby stuff up front, backed up by a thick forest of brilliantly colored young hardwoods-a final insult to the property’s nearly forgotten heritage as a farm.
Movement drew Jake’s attention to his left as he saw a flash of Thorne’s back disappearing among the colors. He followed at a dead run. With the sun resting low on the horizon, streams of light painted a confusing mosaic through the leaves, making it difficult to keep Thorne in sight. Jake couldn’t see their quarry at all.
When Thorne stopped, Jake was with him in an instant. “Where are they?”
Thorne gestured for silence, using the muzzle of his pistol as an extension of his vision as he scanned the forest for movement. “I saw him,” he whispered. “He’s here.”
The words triggered a chill. Where could he be, then? He didn’t have that much of a lead.
“There!” Jake pointed. “Isn’t that blood?”
In the distance, they heard Melissa’s plaintive voice. “Lauren! Lauren, honey, we’re coming!”
Out in front, and off to the right, they heard a child’s muffled cry. Together, they moved toward it, following the blood trail and listening for additional noise.
“Lauren!” This time it was Nick’s voice, and they were getting closer.
Soon the woods opened up again, to reveal another cleared field, with a dilapidated barn growing up out of the center. Jake and Thorne stopped at the edge of the clearing.
“What do you think?” Jake whispered. “Are they inside?”
Thorne shook his head. “He’s too smart to corner himself.”
“Then why…”
A rustle of leaves just inches to their left brought both men around, their guns bearing down on the terrified face of little Lauren. She screamed, yet even at five, she understood the unasked question. “He dropped me!” she shouted.
Jake saw the flash of steel the instant he broke his aim. Wiggins came from nowhere, lunging out of the foliage, propelling his knife in a huge downward arc. Jake got an arm up but couldn’t deflect it all. He grunted as the glancing blow left a wake of torn flesh down the side of his ribs, and he tumbled for cover in the leaves.
The speed of the attack caught Thorne off guard, but once he recovered, he struck like a snake, firing two quick punches, one to the stump of what used to be Wiggins’s hand, and the other to his face. The gunman went down hard but rolled fluidly to his feet. As he took a martial-arts stance, or a pitiful imitation of one, he seemed to notice for the first time that his right arm was four inches shorter than his left. He shifted his eyes to the stump, and in that instant, Thorne dropped him with a chilling elbow shot to the jaw.
Thorne was out of control. He muscled his trophy off the ground and punched him again. “Who are you, you son of a bitch?”
The man said nothing. For an instant, Jake wondered if the guy was already dead.
This time Thorne’s fury took the form of a savage kick to the gunman’s testicles. The mystery man made a gagging sound and tried to clutch at himself, but Thorne launched him back with yet another kick, this one to his face.
“Stop it!” Melissa shrieked, appearing with Nick at the edge of the clearing.
“What’s your name, asshole?” Thorne yelled, preparing for another kick.
“Wiggins!” Melissa answered for the gunman, even as she ran to be with her daughter. “He already told me his name is Wiggins!”
Thorne shook his head. “I want to hear it from him.”
“Not here!” Nick yelled, clearly torn between joining his wife and confrontingThorne. His skin gray with pain and fear, he chose the latter. “Not in front of my daughter, Thorne!”
Thorne looked thoroughly disgusted. “Do you know what this rat turd tried to do?”
It was Jake’s turn. “This isn’t the plan,” he said, shooting a glance toward the terrified little girl who sat hugging her knees at the base of a tree. The blood from her chin left a sweat trail down the front of her neck, which Melissa tried to wipe away with her one good hand. “Let’s stick with the plan.”
Thorne laughed loud and hard. “Plan! What plan? You don’t have a plan, Jake!”
Jake felt his face flush. “We agreed-”
“We didn’t agree to shit!” Thorne declared. “You came up with the pea-brain idea that Mr. Terminator here would spill his guts. All we had to do was say ‘pretty please.’ ” He laughed again and launched another kick to Wiggins’s ribs. “Just like Murder, She Wrote, right, ace?”
“But my daughter-” Nick said.
“What about her? Get her outta here, if you want. I’m not stopping you!”
Nick swallowed hard, then glanced nervously over toward his wife and daughter before whispering, “You can’t do this here. I don’t want that kind of involvement. That’s not what I signed on for.”
Thorne set his jaw angrily. A long moment passed as he struggled with his temper, and when he finally spoke, his voice trembled. “You’re in this up to your eyeballs, Nick. Remember that. Don’t you dare think even for a minute that you’re not a part of it all.” He leveled a forefinger and lowered his voice. Anger burned in his expression, genuine loathing. “You do yourself a favor and think real long and real hard before you go soft, you hear?” He let the words sink in for a moment. “Now, why don’t you and the missus go back to the house and clean up? Jake and I will take care of what needs to be done. Tomorrow morning, you can tell your kid all about how real nightmares can seem.” He paused again, for effect. “You’ve got a secret now, Nick, and I expect you to keep it. Now get outa here. Go find that hotel you were talking about and make sure it’s a million miles from here.”
“Suppose someone sees you?”
That one caught Thorne off guard. He scowled as he considered the question. “What’s inside that barn?” he asked, pointing.
“It’s just a storage shed,” Nick said as Thorne began dragging his prey in that direction.
Thorne called over his shoulder, “You’re with me, ace!”
Jake ignored him and took a step closer to his old friend. In the distance, he could hear children’s voices calling for their mom and dad. “Is that your boys?”
Nick nodded. “I guess they just got home.”
Jake nodded back. It was an awkward moment. “Look, Nick…”
“You’re welcome, Jake, okay? Let’s just leave it at that.”
Jake stood still for a moment, wanting to say something but unable to construct the sentence. Finally, he nodded. “Okay, Nick. Thanks. And I’m sorry.”
Nick nodded, too, but looked away. “I’m glad I could do my part. Now, just do us all a favor and end it.”
“About your wife…”
“Just end it, Jake. I’ll worry about my wife.”
It was a sickening thing to watch. Wiggins sat bolt upright in the middle of the dusty skeleton of a barn while Thorne secured the man’s neck directly to the twelve-by-twelve center support column with five loops of duct tape. A tourniquet at the gunman’s wrist, fashioned out of an old rag and a screwdriver, kept him from bleeding to death, even as blood and snot continued to leak freely from his shattered nose. With the man’s neck secured, Thorne went to work on his arms, binding them with loop after loop of tape, just above the elbows.
“You like to be called Wiggins?” Thorne growled as he worked. “That’s fine with me. What I want to know is who you work for. And why. Every little detail.” Thorne tore off the last piece of tape and tossed the roll aside. “Won’t it be fun?”