63
Summoning all of his courage-easy to do after he’d guzzled six cans of beer-Ed had resolved to rescue his daughter from Their house.
He’d been given a second chance to do right by his little girl. He had probably deserved to lose her before, but after years of saving dogs from the cruel streets and giving them a safe haven, proving his worth as a man, he believed God had finally deemed him fit to have his child again.
He did not know how to raise a child, but he had plenty of food, a warm home, and a loving heart. Surely that had to be enough.
He took a handful of dogs with him as he went out again into the damp darkness. The canines pranced around him in the muddy front yard, tails wagging. They seemed more excited than usual, as if they were aware of the importance of the mission at hand.
“Ed’s going to get his little girl,” he said to them. “We’re going to save her from Them.”
He’d watched Their house for hours. The white van had returned. He hoped that he would not have to fight Them, hoped that he could reason with Them somehow, but just in case They did not listen, he had his bowie knife.
Feeling light-headed from all the beers he’d drunk, he plunged into the woods. A fat moon gave the forest a ghostly glow. The rain had subsided, but the undergrowth was drenched from the hours of continuous rainfall, mud slurping at his boots and splattering his pants.
It made him wonder how he would clothe his little girl. He would have to go to her old bedroom and see what pieces of clothing she had left behind when her mother had taken her away from him. He hoped everything still fit her. The possibility of having to purchase new dresses and blouses and shoes and whatever else little girls liked to wear frightened him so much he had to stop thinking about it, because if he did, he would go back inside his house and convince himself that it really wasn’t his little girl trapped in Their home. It was a ghost, as he’d first thought, and he was simply losing his mind.
Suddenly, the dogs went rigid.
“What is it?” he asked. Peering into the undergrowth ahead, he listened closely for sounds. He heard only the plink and plop of rainwater ticking onto leaves and bark. “Someone out there?”
One of the dogs with him, the perceptive black Lab that had a knack for tagging along, bolted ahead in a dark streak. The other canines followed.
“Hey, wait for Ed,” he said.
The dogs ignored him. They disappeared in the shadows.
He ran after them as fast as he could with the cane, breath wheezing from his parched lips, legs aching dully from when he’d run through the woods earlier.
He pushed through a thick wall of shrubs. Ahead, under the leafy boughs of a maple, the dogs had gathered around something. They chuffed in excitement, tails swishing through the grass.
He lumbered closer. And dropped his cane in shock.
It was the little girl from the window.
Somehow, she had escaped Them on her own.
The Lab pressed close to the child, licked her face. Petting the dog behind the ears, the girl looked up at Ed, her eyes bright as bells.
“My name is Jada Webb,” she said slowly. She pointed behind her. “I ran away from that house back there. My Mom and I are in trouble. Can you help us, please, mister?”
Ed blinked slowly. Her words had whispered like a soft breeze around his thoughts, and failed to stir comprehension.
Instead, his gaze was fixed on her pajamas.
A colorful cartoon image of a dog was on the front of her shirt. Her fluffy pink shoes were fashioned to look like little dogs, too.
His breath caught in his throat. Her clothing was the truest sign imaginable of her identity.
“Laura,” he said in a voice cracked with emotion, speaking the name he thought he had forgotten. “Oh, Laura, my sweet baby.”
The girl frowned. “Mister, my name is-”
With a cry of joy, he hooked his hands underneath her arms and plucked her off the ground. He swept her to his chest and hugged her.
“You’ve come home to me at last,” he said. “Oh, thank you, God, thank you.”
His daughter squirmed and kicked in his embrace, sending one of her fuzzy slippers hurtling into the bushes. A thin whine escaped her. He muffled her mouth with his hand.
“There, there, hush now, Laura, hush,” he said. He buried his nose in her hair, and the sweet smell of her made his heart kick. “Don’t you remember Ed? Ed’s your daddy, sweetheart. Let’s go home with Ed now. You’ll love Ed’s house, he has lots and lots of nice, friendly dogs.”
Laura cried, but that was okay. It had been so long since they had seen each other, so many long, lonely years, that she couldn’t help but shed wonderful tears of joy.
Warm tears streamed down his cheeks, gathered in his beard.
He was crying, too.
64
Halfway through his drive, Corey had pulled off the highway and found a Wal-Mart that was open around the clock. They didn’t sell guns, unfortunately. The only useful weapon he could buy was a Buck hunting knife.
He paid cash for the blade, a compact flashlight, batteries, and a metro area map, and hurried back to the car.
The map spread on the passenger seat, he plotted the rest of his route. His BlackBerry had a GPS mapping feature, but he was reluctant to turn on the phone for fear of inviting an FBI trace.
Near the end of his trip, the rainfall tapered off. As the storm clouds dispersed, the moon came through, casting a bone-pale sheen.
Driving through a wooded area sparsely populated with old, ramshackle homes nestled deep within trees, he spotted an ornate, stacked-stone sign coming up on the right side of the road: ARCHER LAKE. Another nearby sign tempted: FROM THE 300S. NEW HOME SITES AVAILABLE!
His pulse quickened. This was definitely the subdivision he remembered.
He hung a right. The community was steeped in darkness, the street lamps shut off. The three contemporary models they had toured last fall were on his immediate right. They were shuttered and dark, with no indications of recent activity.
He crawled down the asphalt road, tires grinding over rocks and splashing through pools of water. All of the houses he passed by were unfinished. Many of the lots were only mounds of red clay bordered by black silt fences. Through a line of pine trees on his left, he glimpsed a lake in the distance, surface streaked with moonlight.
He arrived at a three-way intersection. To his right, there were more half-finished properties. To his left, more houses, too, a couple of which appeared closer to completion than the others he had seen.
He also saw, in the moon glow, muddy tire tracks crisscrossing to the driveway of one of the homes on the left. It was a large, two-story house with a side-entry garage and an elegant brick facade. It stood in a cul-de-sac, backed by a wall of forest.
A shiver coursed down his spine. That was the safe house. Even without the evidence of the tire tracks, it just felt right to him.
Not wanting to risk driving closer, he cut off the engine.
65
Blood pounding in her ears, Simone pressed the muzzle underneath Leon’s chin. Her finger tingled on the trigger, and from Corey’s lessons on handgun security, she knew enough about guns to know that you should never point a loaded weapon at anyone unless you were willing to fire.
She was willing, God help her. Considering the sheer hell this man had put her and her family through, he deserved a bullet to the head.
But Leon was smirking. “You won’t shoot me, Clair Huxtable. You don’t have the chutzpah, you lack the cojones, you’re only some talented-tenth princess bitch in way over her pretty little bourgeois head, skinny-dipping in the Pacific with the white sharks now. If you’ve got any functioning brain cells at all you’ll put down the Glock and finish what we’ve started, I’m getting blue balls sitting here with your bubblicious ass riding my dick. Put the gun down, all right, put it down and let me give it to you raw, how about back door, you ever had that, huh, I bet not, how about I introduce you to some new experiences, how about I shove my dick in your mouth and cum in the back of your throat, let you swallow my tasty kids, how would you like that, yeah, all right, huh. .”