Hobbled (28 page)

But that was impossible. The blond kid was in that house. Maybe. Charles Strickland. That decaying human finger Bradley carried around in his back pocket came from someone. The odds of it being anyone
other
than Charles Strickland were pretty slim. If Childers wasn’t holding the guy hostage, and it was certainly starting to look like he wasn’t, then who was? Dinkens? Was that possible? Childers sure as hell didn’t kill his own cat and throw it in Danny’s pool. Besides, they had just watched him go into his house with the bimbo in the high heels only minutes before it happened.

But Dinkens was home. Dinkens was close. And Dinkens was a creep. That should be enough evidence for anybody, Danny thought. It was beginning to be enough for him.

That’s why he didn’t want Luke anywhere near the guy. Especially not without Danny there to look after him.

But Danny had his dad to think about too. And their future together, him and his dad.

Crap. Moral dilemmas were a pain in the butt.

Granger gave himself a shake to remove some of the rainwater from his coat. He shook it all over Danny and Luke, getting them wetter than they already were, if that were even possible. It got them moving too.

“Okay,” Danny said. “I’ll wait here. I’ll give you ten minutes. No more.”

Luke grinned. “You’re not wearing a watch.”

Danny harrumphed. “Fine. I’ll count off the seconds in my head. Then I’ll go in the house and use your phone to call the cops. I can’t call out on my phone. Judge’s orders.”

“You don’t really have to call the cops, Danny. You can just stick your foot over the hedge and they’ll be here before you know it. Every cop in town.”

“True.” Danny took a deep breath, shivered from the cold, pulled Luke tight into his arms, and said, “If you see Strickland, come right back out. We’ll let the cops handle it. If you get stuck, or if Dinkens starts anything, scream as loud as you can, and I’ll get the police’s attention one way or another.” Then he frowned. It was a really pitiful frown, what with his shivering and with all the rain dribbling down his face and his long wet hair slathered to his cheeks and forehead. “I feel like a coward not going with you.”

Luke kissed Danny’s frown to see if it would go away. It didn’t. Not entirely. “You’re not a coward, babe. You’re backup. If this were a movie, you’d be the guy watching Bruce Willis’s ass.”

A dreamy look crossed Danny’s face. “Well,
that
puts it all in a pleasantly new perspective.” And when Luke shook a warning fist in Danny’s face with a grin, Danny hastily added, “Of course, I’d rather be watching
your
ass. Not that Bruce doesn’t have a fine posterior and all. For an old guy.”

“That’s better,” Luke said, leering and waggling his eyebrows in a blink of lightning. Then he gave Danny a quick kiss. Before Danny knew what was happening, Luke was gone from his side, duck-walking across the wet grass, keeping low so he couldn’t be seen from the other side of the hedge. He joined Bradley and DeVon at the edge of the lawn, and Danny had to grin at the two kids when they pulled out of each other’s arms just before Luke got there. Danny supposed at their age it was better to suffer hypothermia than be thought a fruit loop.

Well, they’d grow out of that one day. Maybe. Danny certainly did.

T
HE
picket fence that abutted Danny’s east hedge was only three feet high. So was the hedge. There was no gate, but Luke figured they wouldn’t need one.

Three heads peeked over the hedge. Luke, Bradley, DeVon. They all three wiped the rain out of their eyes at the same time, almost as if their movements were choreographed.

“See anything?” Luke hissed.

“Just rain,” DeVon hissed back.

“And one ugly-ass house,” hissed Bradley. They all three giggled.

“Come on then,” Luke said, assuming the mantle of leadership whether the kids wanted him to or not. Age carried a few rewards with it. So did height.

Luke was the first to fight his way through the hedge and straddle the fence. Once that was accomplished, he offered a helping hand to Bradley and DeVon. They seemed grateful for the help. While the fence was only three feet tall, that’s a pretty good straddle for an eleven-year-old. And the points on the picket fence were sharp as hell. Neither of the boys wanted to slip in the mud and find
those
things crammed up their butts.

Safely across the fence, they once again hunkered low and waited for the lightning to show them which way to go.

They didn’t have to wait long. The lightning struck so hard and so near, they almost all keeled over in a dead faint. Thunder boomed out in a horrendous crash about two seconds later.

“That was
close
,” Luke hissed when the sky finally stopped grumbling.

“Look,” DeVon said, pointing toward the corner of Dinkens’s house where a downspout was shooting water across the yard like a water cannon. “There’s a little back porch back there. Let’s get in out of the rain.”

“Okay,” Luke said. Reaching out he took both boys’ hands. Stooping low they ran across the gravel driveway, which made way too much noise under their feet, and then they sloshed through a lawn of mud since there wasn’t any grass on it. The porch was about two feet off the ground. There was no railing, but it did have a roof. They carefully stepped up out of the rain, praying to God the boards beneath their feet wouldn’t squeak. They did, but not much. The roar of the storm would surely cover the sound.

By this time, Luke was sorely regretting not donning shoes like the kids had told him to. His bare feet were freezing, and the gravel in the driveway had felt like chunks of glass underfoot.

It was nice being out of the rain for a change, although it didn’t warm them up much. The wind swept around the back of the house like it had just blown off a glacier. The porch was covered with a tin roof and the rain struck it with such force, and made so much noise doing it, the three didn’t even try to talk to each other. They just cowered together against the back of the house as far from the door as they could get and considered their options.

Thankfully, Dinkens didn’t have any exterior lights on. There was a fixture for a porch light stuck on the wall above where Luke was cowering, and looking up at it now, Luke saw there wasn’t even a light bulb in it. Well, good. That made their job a little easier.

An unlatched screen door was hung over the back door, and it banged and rattled in the wind. There was a window onto the porch, but a heavy curtain was drawn across it. No light could be seen coming from the inside. If anyone tried to look out, Luke would see the curtain move. Adversely, the damn curtain prevented them from peeking into the interior of the house to see what was going on in there, if anything. There was no window in the door.

Luke regretted not asking Danny before they split up if Dinkens had a dog they should be worried about. He figured he’d try to ask the kids, if they ever got far enough away from that rattling screen door and thundering tin roof where they could carry on a conversation without having to yell.

It dawned on Luke that if Charles Strickland sobbed now, they would never be able to hear it. Hell, the guy could scream bloody murder ten feet away and they might never hear a thing.

They had to get inside the house.

While Bradley and DeVon watched with wide, frightened eyes, Luke slowly peeled open the unlatched screen door and ever so gently tested the door knob on the back door. He could almost hear the kids breathe a sigh of relief when Luke learned it was locked.

Luke looked out into the rain with the kids crowded up behind him.

They would just have to find a different way in.

D
ANNY
watched Luke and the boys wade through the hedge and hop the fence, then he limped up to the hedge at the same spot where they had just been and peered across into Dinkens’s yard. He just glimpsed the tail end of the three of them running for the back of Dinkens’s house. After they rounded the corner, Danny couldn’t see them anymore. He was holding onto Granger’s collar, and the dog wasn’t too happy about it. Danny couldn’t tell if Granger wanted to follow Luke or if he just wanted to get out of the rain. Funny that those were pretty much the only two things Danny wanted right then as well.

Unfortunately, the poor dog would just have to forget it. Danny needed Granger there with him. For moral support if nothing else. Plus the dog couldn’t be trusted not to bark at the wrong time and expose Luke and the kids to danger. They were dealing with a serial killer after all. This wasn’t a church picnic.

Danny’s broken leg was really killing him now. It was all the moisture in the air, he supposed. Plus his cast was soaked. It felt kind of funky inside. Danny wondered if it was about to disintegrate in the rain. Surely it was sturdier than that. His monitor was still blinking green. Apparently a little rain didn’t affect that thing much. The monitor felt cold and clammy against his skin, like someone had snatched a dead fish out of the fridge and wrapped it around his ankle.

Danny pulled the wet dog closer, and they huddled together against the lashing rain with their faces in the hedge, waiting to see what would happen next. He would hate to do it to his father, but if things went bad on the other side of the fence, Danny was bound and determined to jump the fucking thing and help Luke out. Screw the cops and screw the consequences.

Luke was his lover. If anything happened to Luke, Danny wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to go on. He had never really known before how powerful love can be, but lordy, he knew it now.

“It’ll be okay, boy,” he crooned into Granger’s wet ear. “Luke’ll be back soon. He’ll be back soon.”

And the two of them, man and dog, settled in to wait. They ignored the rain as best they could.

Danny thought about fetching an umbrella, but he didn’t want to leave the hedge even for two seconds in case Luke called for help.

He’d just have to do without it.

On the bright side, Danny figured if the four of them actually solved the killer case for the cops, then surely that would go a long way to making the judge a little more forgiving when it came to Danny breaking house arrest and making that little red light go off.

At least he hoped it would. You never knew with judges.

B
ACK
in the rain, Luke and the kids shivered and groused and tried not to break their necks as they traversed the alien landscape of Dinkens’s backyard. Luke figured the guy must never have thrown anything away in his life. There were more derelicts back here than there were on skid row. A derelict washing machine, the old ringer type, with weeds growing out of the tub. A derelict pickup truck propped up on concrete blocks that looked like it hadn’t seen the highway in thirty years. There were three or four derelict TVs scattered around, and more chairs and tables with broken legs tossed here and there than you could shake a stick at. The guy was hard on his furniture.

DeVon cussed when he got tripped up in a tangle of chicken wire and landed on his hands and knees in the mud. Two seconds later, Luke cussed another blue streak when he stubbed his bare toe on the tipped-over base of a concrete birdbath, which didn’t budge an inch when he banged it. The bowl of the birdbath was nowhere in sight. Luke was pretty sure his toe hit high
C
on impact.

Dinkens had a garage back here that was about to topple over. It didn’t look like he ever used it since he had so much crap piled up in front of the door.

Moving closer to the house, hopefully to get a little out of the rain, they wormed their way along a back wall, trying to see where they were going in the scattered flashes of lightning. DeVon had lost his flashlight at some point during the proceedings. When a particularly extended stretch of darkness left them blind a little longer than usual, Luke once again stubbed his toe on something big and flat and laid out directly in his path right beside the house.

He fell forward in the blackness, expecting to feel his hands hit the mud, but what he hit was something wooden. He hissed with pain when his already skinned knee came down on it hard. He quickly scrambled around trying to get himself back up since he didn’t understand what it was he had landed on.

Then a streak of lightning solved the mystery.

It was the trapdoor into what must be a basement or a fruit cellar. It sat at an angle against the side of the house. The boards were twisted and warped, the paint all flaky from a century of sun and the two doors clattered and banged when Luke landed on them like they were barely holding themselves together.

“Wow,” DeVon whispered, once he got a good look at it. “Is that thing locked?”

And peering closer, Danny saw it was. An old Yale combination lock was stuck through a rusty hasp. The hasp was nailed into the wood with a couple of huge staples that had worked themselves about halfway out over the years. It didn’t look as if the trapdoor was ever used, since it was buried under a mound of old flower pots and crap.

Looking up at the windows of the house to make sure no curtains were moving and no one was watching, Luke gave the lock a tug, and damned if it didn’t come off in his hand, hasp and all.

DeVon and Bradley immediately started clearing the top of the trapdoor of all the junk piled on it as quietly as they could. In less than a minute, they were done.

It was a double door. Each side swung up and out of the way. Carefully, Luke gripped the edge of the side closest to him and lifted. With a squeak, the door opened up. And as soon as it did, the three of them gave a gasp of surprise. Quickly, Luke lowered the door back down.

They gazed at each other in the rain.

“There was a light on,” Bradley hissed.

“Yeah,” DeVon said. “You think the dude’s in there?”

There had been a light in the basement indeed. A dim one, but a light. Luke had just caught a glimpse of muddy concrete steps leading down to a dirty landing before he decided to shut the trapdoor again and think things over before proceeding.