CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Give us Hoffman!”The voice startled Lacey awake. She raised her head off the couch and saw Dukane crouched by the front window.“Give us Hoffman,” the tinny voice continued, “and we’ll let you live.”Lacey rushed to Dukane’s side. Looking out the window, she saw the black Rolls Royce stopped in front of the house—perhaps thirty feet away. The doors on its far side stood open, but the body of the car hid what ever was being done.“I warn you,” said the amplified voice. Lacey spotted its source: a man on a distant rise of land, speaking into a megaphone. “Give us Hoffman, or you will all be annihilated. There is no escape for you unless you do as we ask. You have seen what we do to our enemies. Each of you will meet a similar end, if you continue to ignore our request.” The megaphone was lowered.Lacey heard the bathroom door open. Scott rushed across the floor and knelt at the other window.From behind the car came a heavy clank. A hammer striking metal? The pounding continued with a slow, even rhythm.“What’re they doing?”Scott frowned at Lacey, and she saw anguish in his eyes. He backhanded speckles of sweat off his upper lip. “Maybe you shouldn’t watch.”“You think it’s Nancy?”“Yeah.”Dukane suddenly rushed from the room.The pounding stopped for a few seconds, then started again. Lacey scurried over to Scott’s window.“Sounds like they’re driving in stakes,” he said.“Oh God.” Lacey sank down. Turning, she sat beneath the window with her back against the wall. She brought up her legs, hugged them to her breasts, pressed her mouth to one knee.The slow pounding kept on.Dukane returned to the room, crouching low, a wine bottle in hand.“Nobody’s moving in,” he said, and squatted near the other front window. “Can you tell what they’re doing?”“Driving in stakes, I think.”“Shit,” he muttered. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, tore it in half, and twisted one of the pieces into a strip. He stuffed it into the bottle’s mouth, and drew it out. The pungent fumes of gasoline stung Lacey’s nostrils.He reversed the rag and stuffed it into the bottle again. Three inches hung out like a wick.The pounding outside continued.“Anybody got a match?”Lacey hurled herself forward, scurried to the coffee table, and grabbed a lighter. She raced back to Dukane.“When I open the door, light the rag.”Lacey nodded, suddenly excited, eager to be striking back.Dukane jerked the door open.Lacey lighted the wick. As fire bloomed from the dripping rag, Dukane pitched the bottle. He slammed the door shut and dived into Lacey, throwing her to the floor as bullets burst through the wood above them. Splinters rained down.Dukane rolled off, and scrambled to his window. Lacey saw Scott take aim. She rushed to his side as the flaming car lunged forward, its far doors still open, leaving two men behind. One raced after it, yelling, his open Hawaiian shirt fluttering behind him like a cape. He turned a somersault as Scott’s bullet smacked the back of his head. The other man, on his knees with a hammer when the car left him unprotected, sprang to his feet. He ran toward the house, waving the hammer overhead like the tomahawk of a demented Apache.“Let him come!” Dukane yelled. “We can use him.”His naked body, as bony as a starved man, was streaked with blood. Not his own, Lacey assumed. What had he been doing? She was afraid to look away from him. He ran toward the window, shrieking, and looked about to dive through when a dozen bullets hit him from behind.Scott threw Lacey back.The man’s head drove into the window as if trying to squeeze itself between two of the flat, open slats of glass. They burst, tearing his scalp, ripping the sides of his face and neck. His chin came to rest on the sill. Blood slid down the inside of the wall.Lacey scooted backward, unable to look away from the ghastly man’s head. “Get…get him
out of here!” she stammered. “Get him OUT!”“Oh good Christ,” Dukane said. He was staring out his window. “My God, those…!” Leaping away from the window, he took quick strides toward the dead man’s protruding head.“What did they…?”“Bastards!” Dukane swung up his leg in a vicious kick, catching the man in the face. The head bounded upward. Lacey glimpsed its torn, mashed face. The eyes seemed to glare at her with hatred for an instant as the head smashed through three more louvers. Then it dropped backward out of sight.Scott ran to the window. He knelt beside it and looked out. “Oh no,” he muttered. He turned to Dukane, his face ashen. “What’ll we do?”“Nothing.”“Nothing?”“We can’t get to her. They’d nail us before we got a yard.”“We can’t just leave her like that!”“Want to put her out of misery?”“No! My God, Matt! I don’t think she’s even hurt.”“Hard to tell.”“I think she’s all right. But my God, we can’t just…Stop!” he told Lacey, raising his hand like a traffic cop as she crawled forward. “You don’t want to see it.”“What? What did they do to her? You said she’s all right.”“They’ve got her staked down. With Jan.”“Jan?”“What’s left of her,” Dukane muttered. “They’re tied facetoface.”