Nate was in the midst of pivoting from the living room toward the stairs when a door opened next to him. He had thought it was a broom closet, but it was a bathroom. A woman jerked with surprise, the same person who had answered the door earlier and shooed him away. Her eyes flared as she stepped back, clutching her chest.
In the blink of an eye, Nate had the pistol trained on her. “Scream and you’re dead.” If she doubted his warning, all she needed was to look in his eyes—dark pools of deep loathing. They deserved to die, but Nate still hadn’t lost enough of his humanity to execute them on the spot. “Where’s the man I saw earlier?”
“He’s gone,” she said, her lips pulling back from a mouth with few teeth.
Nate cold-cocked her with the pistol. It struck the side of her face with a wet slap and a crack. Her head snapped to one side and her knees went weak. He reached out with his free hand to keep her standing. She fell back against the bathroom door, pushing it closed. A trail of blood ran down the side of her face.
Nate was about to ask her again when a voice echoed down to them from the second floor. “Biscuit, you all right? Sounded like you fell.”
The woman glared at Nate with hatred so tangible he could feel it oozing out of her.
“Tell him you’re fine, that you want to show him something.”
From upstairs, worried now: “Biscuit?”
“Tell him,” Nate said, putting the barrel to her forehead.
The toothless woman drew in a deep breath, resigned to her fate. “Skinny, get your gun and come shoot this mother―”
Nate pulled the trigger. The room exploded with a deafening bang as the woman’s head snapped back, this time for good. She crumpled to the floor with a loud thud.
Then footsteps upstairs running down a hall, away from the stairs.
It sounded like Skinny was taking Biscuit’s advice and getting his gun. What that might be Nate didn’t know. If he could get upstairs quick enough, he might be able to drop this lowlife before he got a chance to throw any lead.
Nate took the risers two at a time. The top step opened onto a narrow corridor, twenty feet in length. This had been the favorite part of Jay’s many house tours as he’d recounted the trials and tribulations of knocking down walls and laying down pine floorboards.
Since then, it had gone from a conversation piece to a possible kill zone. Nate poked his head out for a quick glance. One bedroom lined either side. The master bedroom was at the end of the darkened hallway. At least that was the layout as Nate remembered it. But the lack of light wasn’t on account of the sun going down. It was still early afternoon and that wouldn’t be happening for a couple more hours. The blinds had been pulled down in nearly every room. Whatever was going on here, Skinny and Biscuit wanted to keep it hidden. Now that same criminal desire for privacy meant Nate would be forced to charge headfirst down a narrow hallway with no sense of what was waiting for him at the other end.
A second quick peek to get his bearings provided the answer he was looking for. And that came in the form of a loud boom from a pump-action shotgun. Buckshot tore into both sides of the corridor, the bulk of it punching a wide hole in the wall at the top of the stairs.
Skinny racked his weapon and waited.
He couldn’t stay there forever, Nate knew. Eventually he’d run out of food, water and maybe even ammunition. Complicating the matter were the people being held prisoner in the basement. Nate couldn’t leave and return with reinforcements or pick Skinny off outside as he tried to flee. In that case, Skinny might very well slaughter everyone downstairs to cover up his many crimes. Nate was quite sure the court system in the United States was mostly on hold right now. But judging by the looks of them, this couple appeared to have more teeth than brain cells.
“You killed my wife, you sonbitch,” Skinny yelled. The man had an accent. Sounded like he was from Georgia or South Carolina.
“You’re a long way from home,” Nate said, his voice echoing down the empty hallway. “What’s a nice boy like you doing kidnapping folks and holding them in your basement? What would your parents think of that, eh, Skinny?”
“Shut your mouth,” the man said, firing three angry salvos, striking the same patch of drywall.
“I’ll bet Biscuit was the one who led you astray,” Nate went on. “The one who suggested you steal Jay’s house and then grab those innocent people. That’s the name of the man whose place you took, in case you didn’t know. He’s a hard-working American. Built much of this place with his bare hands and now here you are tearing it apart. But I guess losers like you only know how to break the nice things smart people put together.”
“I told you to shut your stinking mouth!” Skinny shouted in a white-hot rage. He stomped down the hallway, firing three more times towards the voice he wanted nothing more than to blast apart. Nate counted in his head. Skinny turned the corner to find Nate crouched on the stairs. For a moment, the two men looked at one another, fear and curiosity all rolled into one strange, inexplicable emotion. Skinny pulled his trigger first. His shotgun clicked empty, just as Nate had known it would. Skinny’s eyes grew with a sudden dreadful understanding.
“Don’t you just hate when that happens?” Nate said, his voice dripping with satisfaction.
Squealing with terror, Skinny rotated, intending to flee back to the safety of the darkened room. But not before Nate put a bullet into each of his legs.
Skinny howled in pain, flopping to the ground.
A second later, Nate was hovering over him, patting him down for any other weapons. Finding none, Nate asked him for the keys to the locks in the basement.
Skinny only wailed in reply. Clearly, he’d never been shot before.
Nate introduced the lowlife to the same pistol-whip he’d fed Biscuit. “You want the pain to stop, don’t you? Then start talking.”
“Bedroom dresser,” Skinny bellowed through grit teeth. “Bottom drawer.”
“Good boy. Now, tell me why’ve you got people chained up in the basement.”
The man refused to look at him or answer the question. He only lay on his side, clutching at his wounded legs and rocking back and forth.
When it was clear no amount of beating was going to get Skinny into a speaking mood, Nate told him not to move and went into the bedroom. After opening one of the blinds, he started searching. It didn’t take long. A sock with twelve keys was sitting in the bottom drawer, just as Skinny had said it would be. Nate held up the sock with one hand and unclipped the walkie on his belt with the other. “Hey, Ralph, you still out there?”
A crackle of static filled the radio before Ralph’s reply. “Sure thing, bud. You ready for an extraction?”
That made Nate smile. Here the world was falling apart and a guy like Ralph was having the time of his life. There was something innocent, almost admirable about that.
“I’m ready,” Nate said. “Except I found Jay and nine others, so it may take a few trips to ferry them to safety.”
“Eleven altogether?” Ralph asked.
Nate looked down the hallway at Skinny’s tiny frame. He wasn’t moaning anymore or moving at all. Even from here, Nate could make out the lake of blood pooling around him.
He brought the walkie to his mouth to confirm and stopped. There was another sound, different from Skinny’s blubbering. Although muffled, it was steady and high-pitched. Nate rotated, fixing in on its location. Was someone else in the house, waiting to jump out at him?
“Nate, still waiting on your response,” came Ralph’s voice blaring over the walkie.
Nate twisted the volume knob down a few notches and pulled out his SIG, moving purposefully toward a door on the other side of the room.