When She Left: A Thriller, page 12
Besides, he didn’t think his new therapist would agree with his plans.
Kill Jake and Melissa to free himself from the Winterses.
Murder William McKenna to save his family.
Slaughter everyone standing in the way of his happiness.
CHAPTER TWELVE
JAKE
Harold sat against the boat, balefully glaring at Jake.
“Have you been shot before?” Jake asked.
“Can’t say I have.”
“You’re handling it really well.” Jake glanced at Harold’s bare leg, the pants leg cut away. His leg was surprisingly small and thin and starkly white, like wispy smoke.
Jake lifted his camera, the strap around his neck and under his arm, aimed it at Harold’s thigh. The torn skin resembled brittle fall leaves, the dried blood a burnt auburn.
“What do you take all those pictures for anyway?” Harold asked. “Who sees them?”
“Nobody yet.”
“You think someone’s going to want to see my hurt leg someday?”
“It’s not your leg.” Jake lifted the camera, gazed through the viewfinder. “It’s something else.”
“Son, it’s still a bullet wound,” he heard Harold say. “No matter how you look at it.”
“I meant it’s not just that.” Jake lowered himself to his elbows, looked past the wounded flesh in front of him, the edges like torn pages.
Jake snapped the photograph, examined it in the Lumix’s display. He thought about showing it to Harold but doubted the older man would care. Subjects never responded the way he wanted. Instead, they often criticized Jake’s photos, asked for a retake or a different angle.
As if they thought the image belonged to them.
“You worried about Melissa?” Harold asked.
Jake looked up from the camera guiltily. He’d been staring so intently at the photo that he’d momentarily forgotten Melissa had left.
“No offense,” Harold went on, “but I don’t think you’re the kind of man to keep her safe. You barely took me down, and I’m not exactly Charles Atlas.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Just can’t see how you’ll protect her.”
Harold’s words hung in the air.
Jake rose, picked up the gun from the floor. He didn’t like holding the weapon, its heaviness or the way he felt that, at any moment, the gun might fire. He hated violence, how it permeated every instance of culture, seemed destined to affect every American. Jake knew the notion sounded hopelessly naive, but he often wondered if a peaceful country was even possible. He rarely watched the news, but when something flashed across his phone, a school shooting or a politician spewing hate, Jake felt such uneasiness and despair, as if the country was coming apart, different factions pulling it to the right and left until violence irreparably tore it in two. And violence would beget violence.
“You’re right,” Jake told Harold. “I can’t protect her. But she and I can protect each other.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, it sounded better in my head.”
It had been a while since Melissa left. Jake walked around the back of the boat, reached the broken window, a dark stain of Harold’s blood from where the older man had fallen. Jake gazed out into the day.
He didn’t see Melissa. Didn’t see anyone, just the fan of trees and the sound of unseen water lapping behind them, like an animal at a water bowl in a distant room.
Jake lifted his camera and heard Harold ask, alarmed, “Who are you?”
A response, low and indecipherable.
Fear filled Jake like light.
Whoever was talking to Harold must have climbed through the window and walked around the opposite side of the boat. He and Jake had inadvertently circled each other.
“Jake was just here,” Harold said plaintively. And there was another low response Jake couldn’t understand.
He wanted to climb out the window and run off.
He wanted to hide until whatever was going to happen happened.
He wanted to crawl forward on his knees and beg for his life.
Jake was afraid, violently afraid.
“I told you,” Harold said urgently. “I don’t know where they went.”
Jake’s hands were on the windowsill, shards of glass pressed into his palms.
He let go of the window. Quietly walked back toward Harold, like Harold’s pleading voice was a siren, luring him to danger. Or a shipwrecked sailor, calling for help.
Jake carried the gun in one hand and the camera in the other, pressed against his chest. He crouched between the bows of two large speedboats, where he could hide and watch. Peered around the corner.
Jake could only see the interrogator’s back, wide under a black duster and dark jeans and boots. He was bent over Harold, saying something too low for Jake to understand.
The shears Melissa had found and used to cut Harold’s jeans were behind the stranger.
“I’m not ready,” Harold said. “Please.”
The man stood, and Jake saw the back of his neck and the side of his cheek. Scars everywhere, burn marks like a busy road map of some congested city. Despite his fear, Jake lifted his camera.
The man reached into a backpack and pulled out a bottle, squinted at the label, twisted off the cap.
He poured the contents of the bottle over Harold’s body.
Jake smelled gasoline.
Saw the small yellow gleam of a match.
Jake hadn’t planned on rising and running, wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do when he reached the man. He thought about abruptly changing course and turning in the other direction, and Jake actually liked that idea very much, but his body wouldn’t obey his mind.
He simply couldn’t stop himself from running over and grabbing the man’s scarred wrist and snuffing out the match.
The man looked at Jake with surprise. He tried to pull his wrist free, but Jake grimly hung on.
What happened to my gun? Jake thought.
Oh no.
He had no idea where the gun was. Still in his hand? No, Jake’s hands were wrapped around the other man’s wrists, vainly hanging on.
Had he dropped it before he charged?
Maybe.
Strange how calm his mind was as he struggled, as the other man finally pulled one of his hands free.
“Get out!” Jake screamed.
Well, that scream wasn’t very calm, Jake thought, still with that weird disassociation. It was like a version of him was fixed on escaping, another was determined to help Harold, a third was losing this fight, and a fourth was dismally watching everything happen.
“Go!” Jake screamed. He grabbed the man’s free arm again, hanging on like he was dangling from a branch that protruded from just below a cliff’s edge.
He wasn’t even sure who he was screaming at, Harold or the stranger or himself. All of them. Begging everyone to leave this situation, for the violence to end.
An accidental kick sent the shears sliding toward Harold. The older man quickly cut himself loose, and, for a hopeful second, Jake thought Harold might help him. But Harold just stood and hurriedly limped away.
The gasoline seemed to be everywhere, in Jake’s clothes and nose and hair and mouth. The other man again pulled a hand free, and Jake suddenly felt his fist. The punch was like finding out a car had run over your dog, so powerful it was emotional, and knocked Jake to the floor, a punch so transcendental it took all those versions of Jake and sent them flying back into his body.
He lay flat in the pool of gasoline, stunned.
I sure get punched a lot, Jake thought distantly.
The scarred man stood over him and glowered down. Jake lifted a hand as the other man lifted his lighter.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MELISSA
Melissa remembered the control she’d felt that long night when Harold kept waking up in pain, a night that had left her sleepless but far from exhausted. There was something about that situation, the stress and strain, that energized her. Given her a newfound rush of being needed, and with need came something close to power.
But that feeling was gone. Ever since stumbling upon the clerk’s body, Melissa had barely felt conscious. She ran back to the warehouse, crying and gasping, away from violence and death, like a dream from which she couldn’t wake.
Melissa reached a bend in the path and stumbled off. Slipped into a small outcropping of trees near the water, collapsed to the dirt, tears clouding her vision. Panic thundered through her like raging horses.
That dying man on his knees at the diner.
The waitress crawling into death.
The murdered boy at the store.
Maybe someone other than the Winterses had killed him, Melissa thought, and she hated herself for that hope. But if it hadn’t been the Winterses, then his death hadn’t been her fault. It was possible some other criminal had strolled into the store.
Regardless, she needed to get back to Jake.
Melissa finally reached the broken window, grasped the frame where it was clear of glass. She wasn’t sure what she and Jake could do or where they would go; she just knew they had to leave. Death was circling once again.
She saw something on the grass.
Blood, drops of blood, a red path like raindrops had fallen around the warehouse.
Voices inside.
Melissa climbed in, lowered herself softly to the floor, walked around the edges. Reached the other side of the warehouse and crept toward the yacht she and Jake were using. From the shadows of a catamaran, she saw a man standing over Jake, Jake pushing himself backward with one hand, his other raised defensively.
Melissa had never seen that man until this moment, but she recognized the scars from stories she’d heard.
Seth.
If men like Seth had been hired to find them, then Melissa knew she and Jake were in greater danger than she’d imagined.
Jake kept scooting backward, casting about desperately. Melissa spotted an open backpack on the ground holding several glass bottles filled with a yellowish-green liquid.
Again, that instinctual pull guided her, despite her fear. She stole forward, picked up one of the bottles.
Seth didn’t see her. She knew Jake was glancing at her and trying not to.
That memory from days earlier, when she’d crept behind Chris with the wine bottle, the hit that had sent her on this path, a bloody christening like a bottle smashing against the side of a departing ship.
She raised her glass weapon over Seth’s head.
Seth reached back and caught her hand before it lowered.
Suddenly Melissa was stumbling. He’d spun around so fast that she hadn’t even seen his other hand move, just felt his fist slam into her cheek.
Melissa fell against one of the boats, a point from something hard pressed into her spine.
Jake stumbled toward Seth, his camera swinging.
Seth glanced over at Jake, almost casually, and grabbed him by the neck. Held him in place with one outstretched arm, squeezing as Jake dropped to his knees.
Seth’s other hand snaked out, slapped the bottle out of Melissa’s hand, grabbed her by the hair and pulled down.
Melissa couldn’t break her fall as the ground rushed toward her. Her forehead smashed into the cement floor, nausea nearly overwhelming her. Patches of her hair felt like they’d been ripped out. His hand stayed on the back of her head, keeping her down, holding her in place as she struggled.
Seth held Melissa by the hair and Jake by the throat, Jake’s face red and cheeks puffed and eyes wide as he choked. He began walking toward the front door, dragging Jake and Melissa with him.
Melissa’s hands were over his, mitigating the pain from his grip but inadvertently holding his hand in place. Her feet scrabbled behind her, struggling to keep pace. Jake was on the other side as Seth grasped his throat, feet dragging, Jake’s body bent backward like a spear’s tip was pressed into his spine.
Seth threw them toward the giant steel door. Melissa felt herself carried as if by a merciless wind, then her palms and cheek slapping down, Jake collapsed next to her.
Seth removed a gun from his backpack and pointed it at her.
Her hands rose.
Melissa had long been fearful of men with guns, of the way men didn’t respect their power, how they played with weapons as fantasy. Weapons were desire, and fear accompanied desire.
But Seth was different.
Until now, Melissa had never seen a man hold a gun who wasn’t, in some way, scared.
Seth kicked the door leading to the small office up front. It took one kick for the door to splinter, another for it to fall open. He strode inside.
“I got Harold out,” Jake told her, pushing himself next to her, his throat raspy. “This guy was going to kill him. Who is he?”
“Seth,” Melissa said.
Chris had told her about him, in the same reverential tones usually reserved for Victor Winters and his murder. Chris had never believed his uncle had been killed by the cops or criminals. He thought a mysterious vigilante had done it, a masked mythical assailant who’d glided into Victor’s house and coldly assassinated him and his girlfriend.
Melissa knew that story couldn’t be true, but Chris wholeheartedly subscribed to it, the way people believed in bigfoot, or how children worried about monsters.
But Seth was real. A hired hit man for the Winterses, he was once set on fire by a woman he’d failed to kill. Probably the only person he’d ever failed to kill.
There was an unstated hierarchy in the Winterses’ organization, and men like Seth were at the top. The pimps and dealers and traffickers were hard and scarred and violent and ruthless and wedded to brutality . . . but even they told hushed, admiring stories about Seth. For most of them, violence was a tool they employed. For Seth and the few like him—a pair of eastern European twins, a married couple in Baltimore, a father in the suburbs of northern Virginia—violence was like breathing. Killing has its rules, and those who navigate that world are the ones who make the rules. Something beyond men.
“The Winterses bring people like him in for important jobs,” she told Jake.
“We’re important?”
A rumbling sound as the large warehouse door behind them lifted.
Seth strode out of the office as the door loudly rose, clanged on completion. Melissa blinked into the sunlight, surprised at how bright the day was. As if she’d run from the store in a dense gray fog.
A small van was alone in the parking lot. Harold’s old car, some type of aged Dodge, was gone.
“Get up,” Seth said, the first words he’d spoken, quiet and direct.
She and Jake unsteadily rose to their feet and walked outside, clutching each other like an elderly couple. Jake wheezed as he walked. Melissa thought he was having problems breathing but realized he was whispering. Saying something to himself.
Jake abruptly stopped and turned toward Seth.
“Keep walking,” Seth said, a hint of weariness in his voice.
“What if you just take me?” Jake asked. “And let Melissa go?”
“No. Walk.”
Jake removed his camera from around his neck. Held it delicately, his thumb rubbing the black plastic.
“You can have my camera,” he said solemnly.
“Jake,” Melissa told him. “No.”
“This is a Lumix D C dash F Z eighty,” Jake went on. “It’s not that expensive, but some bloggers think it’s going to be a discontinued model.” He wiped a spot of blood from the side of his head. “In a few years this little camera will be worth a lot. And right now, it’s a great model for beginners.”
Seth didn’t say anything.
“It just has the one lens,” Jake continued, “and that can’t be removed, but you might not want to. It can even see the craters on the moon. I do want the memory card, but I have a spare in the car. I’ll give it to you, and I’ll even throw in a travel bag . . . although we’d have to stop by my apartment. You can have the camera, the memory card, and the travel bag, and all you have to do is bring me to the Winterses instead of Melissa. I know they’ll still come after her, but this gives her a head start. That’s all I want. Melissa to have another chance.”
“No,” Melissa said to Seth. “Don’t listen to him.”
Jake turned toward her. “Melissa,” he said urgently. “They can take me, but they can’t take both of us. I can survive if I know you’re alive. They can’t kill me as long as I know you’re out there and okay. Do you understand that?”
She couldn’t respond.
“Why don’t I just take both of you and the stupid little camera?” Seth suggested.
“Well,” Jake said after a moment, “you could do that.”
Suddenly there was a flash, and Seth stepped back, hands over his eyes, the gun pressed against his forehead.
Jake grabbed Melissa’s hand, and they turned and started to run.
They reached the edge of the parking lot, and Melissa wondered why she hadn’t heard a shot yet, wondered if Seth was still blinded from the camera, if his handgun had malfunctioned. Jake must have had the same thought because he stopped, turned, and that’s when she heard a crack.
They looked at each other, confused. And then a blossom of blood flowered near Jake’s neck.
He let go of her hand and sank to his knees.
Jake’s legs kicked as he was dragged and then shoved into the van, his hands over the wound, blood filling the spaces between his fingers. His mouth opened and closed, soundlessly, like he was underwater and drowning.
Melissa’s fingers were shaking, her throat hoarse and raw. She wondered if she was screaming, emitting any sounds whatsoever. She felt her tears, dizziness, that rising panic.
Seth pushed her toward the van. She climbed inside numbly, dumbly, knelt next to Jake. Held his hand as he kicked.
Seth was saying something, distinctly, but it was like Melissa had forgotten words. Some small sentence in a threatening tone. He repeated himself, his voice raised.
And then there was another explosion.
But this sound was different from a gunshot.
Seth shouted. Melissa turned. Through the van doors she saw a car veer into the parking lot, gravel flying out from under its tires as it skidded and swerved.
