The space was cluttered, stacked with what seemed to be random pieces of machinery, like a salvage yard. It took him a moment to realize what they were-generators. They were all in pieces, disassembled and scattered. Some were so ancient that it was little surprise he hadn’t recognized them at first. The presence of the generators wasn’t so strange-in a place where hurricane season was serious business, you saw a lot of them-but so many in scattered pieces just added another layer of frenzy to the house. It looked as if someone had been frantically trying to assemble one as time was running short.
There was a special delusion going on in the home, that was clear, but Mark had no sense of exactly what the people who lived here believed.
Beyond the generator was a workbench, and when Mark moved his light to its surface he saw more metal, but this was different from the generators, clean and gleaming. New.
He approached it with caution. There were angled pieces of steel on each end of a central piece that looked like a grate or maybe a drain cover, with ribbed bars and gaps between. The angled sections were hinged. He reached out with his flashlight and tapped the center of the object, and the bench seemed to explode.
The flashlight was torn from his hand and he felt something snap at his finger like a wolf’s teeth and then the flashlight was on the floor, rolling, its beam painting crazy patterns of the generator shadows, and Mark couldn’t see the workbench anymore and didn’t have a damn clue what had happened. It had felt like an explosion, but there was no fuel, and no debris. His heart was thundering and he’d reached for his gun as if he needed to return fire.
He knelt and found the light and turned it back to the bench, and finally he understood-it was a trap. A literal trap, with a spring-loaded central piece that banged those angled jaws home. If he’d tapped on it with his fist instead of the flashlight, he’d have a broken hand.
He turned from the device and back toward the stairs and that was when he saw the dead woman.
She was jammed beneath the short flight of steps, her body pressed into a crevice barely large enough to contain it. He’d walked right over her when he’d entered. Her eyes were open, glittering in the light, bright, but not as bright as the blood that saturated the front of her white dress. Her throat had been slashed, and not long ago-the blood wasn’t entirely dry.
Mark said, “God, no,” as if he could deny the reality.
Slow drips of blood plinked down from the gash in her throat and joined the horrific pool below.
This, Mark thought dully, would be the real Dixie Witte.
When he’d arrived, the blond woman had seemed startled, legitimately bothered by the fact that he was early for his appointment. Had she emerged from the cellar just a few minutes earlier? Had she smashed the remains of a human life under the steps like so much discarded junk and then gone up and put beer on ice?
What if you’d been on time? What was supposed to be in the beer? Was that walk to Medicine Wheel Park actually part of the plan, or was she filling time?
The dead woman’s eyes were fixed on his, and they were the only part of her that seemed to hold a trace of life. He had the disquieting sense that she wished to tell him something, or wished for him to tell her something.
Did you hold hope, even as you died? Did you watch your own blood fill your hands and, even as you understood that it was too much, too fast, still think that there was a chance?
I’m glad they shot Lauren, he thought, because he’d read the autopsy reports, read the expert opinions stating that she wouldn’t have known pain. But who in the hell could say that, really? The living could only guess at how it had gone for the dead. There was no such thing as an expert opinion when it came to death.
He was standing there staring at the corpse when he heard a low, distant rumble like far-off thunder. For a moment he thought that was exactly what it was, the coming of another storm, but the sound remained.
Not thunder.
Myron’s truck.
Shaken back into motion, he straightened and promptly slammed his head into the low ceiling, a teeth-snapping crack; he swore and dipped low again, back into a crouch, and drew his gun. There was a small window in the cellar, right at ground level, that let a small amount of light in. When he went to it, though, the pane was so filthy that it didn’t allow a clear look anywhere, and even if it had, the window faced the backyard. The sound of the truck was coming from the front.
He turned from the window. The only path of exit was up those steps, right over the dead woman.
He crossed the basement in an awkward crouch, trying to keep his eyes on the door but not look at the woman, which was impossible. He’d just reached the base of the steps when he heard the front door open.
He had no idea where his Dixie Witte impostor had gone after she left the house or whether she knew that he’d remained so long. What he did know was that the man who had called himself Myron Pate had probably not been kidding when he promised that the next time he saw Mark, he’d be armed. If Mark stepped out of the cellar now, he’d need to be ready to step out shooting.
Two voices became audible, one deeper, one softer. Floorboards creaked overhead as heavy footsteps pounded through the ancient house. Mark looked at the dead woman just a few feet from him and a part of him felt as if giving himself up to an exchange of gunfire would be better than waiting down here with her any longer. He could smell the blood now; it seemed to be all he could smell, and he wondered how he’d missed it before. He stepped back, turning his face from her.
The sounds above grew louder-too loud, thumps of furniture and banging against the walls, and the front door opened and closed and opened and closed again. How many people were they bringing? It sounded like an invasion. Mark blinked sweat out of his eyes, his shoulder beginning to ache from holding the firing position, his gun aimed at the only door they could come through.
The corpse lay before it like a promise of his fate.
Upstairs, the front door banged open again and Mark heard a male voice say, “Take this,” and he realized what all the traffic up there was: there weren’t more people entering-they were packing up.
You’ve flushed them out, he thought. They’re emptying the house, and doing it in a hurry.
A female voice: “He said to shut it down, and he meant it.”
Then a new sound, splashing, and Mark was painfully slow in understanding it. He had been listening to it for several seconds, confused, when his nose told him what his ears hadn’t-gasoline.
Footsteps pounded into the kitchen for the first time, and he tensed his finger on the trigger, but the door didn’t open. The gasoline sloshed against the door and then the footsteps were gone and all that remained was a slow, steady drip at the top of the stairs. The fuel leaked down the steps and trickled onto the dead woman, joining her blood. Mark stared in horrified fascination as a single drop of gasoline landed directly on her open eye, splashing off the cornea but triggering no blink.
The thundering sound of the truck engine’s starting jerked his attention away. They were ready to leave, and that was both good and bad, because he knew what was coming once they were gone.
Almost immediately there was a whoosh of ignition, and the closed door at the top of the cellar stairs was outlined in a thin orange line.
The house was burning on top of him.
He went up the stairs, crossing over her body. Then he pulled the door open and almost fell back down the stairs in the face of the wave of flames that met him. The kitchen was aglow with fire; flames climbed the walls. Somewhere in the living room, what was left of the gas can exploded, and the blaze that followed it had a flash of blue trapped in the orange and red.