If Looks Could Kill (48 page)

Setting the sensitivity, she tuned the mike in toward the cell block. At her hip, the radio crackled faintly with ongoing news from the hospital. News that Sandy was also privy to at the dispatcher's office not ten feet from the cells.

Breathing. Chris caught it on her first sweep, harsh and uneven, struggled for. Right by the back of the jail, echoing faintly. Inside one of the cells.

Chris's stomach fed on empty fear. It can only get so bad, she kept telling herself. Only so bad. Even so, she heard the rasp of her own breathing. She tasted bile.

Another person. Slower, steady, quiet breathing only a few feet farther on. Not deep. Careful. Awake.

Chris crept along the wall with its barbed-wire fence until she reached the sheriff's window. The lights were on, but the blinds were closed. Nothing to see, but she heard something there, too. A funny whimper and a sigh. One person or two? she wondered.

She tried very hard to hear more, but one of the helicopters roared overhead and drowned out the sound. Chris instinctively looked up to see a television logo. Held her own breath. She was sure they'd caught on somehow. She waited in agony for the spotlight to flash on, for it to pin her on her circle of asphalt like a bug in a flashlight.

They flew on, though, swooping over the next ridge and disappearing. Evidently they'd grown tired of the search or were low on gas.

Chris breathed again, took another swipe at the rivulets that had begun to trace their way down her temples. There were others snaking along the small of her back. Under her arms. She wasn't going to make this. She just couldn't face it.

Temptation whispered. Wait for Mac. He can handle everything. You're pretty sure you know where they are. Let somebody else brave those awful, empty places. Somebody who doesn't see terrors in the darkness. Who doesn't remember voices and heavy hands and formless terror.

If she did that, though, she'd never know. She'd never find out why. Sandy would give Chris her answer. She might not give someone else the chance to ask.

"We've found her," came the voice from the radio on Chris's hip.

Chris started at the sound. Certain again that she'd been heard. That somebody had read her mind and, this time, meant to answer. Holding perfectly still, she looked down for her answers.

John's voice came on, small and tinny. "Where?"

"Down in the basement. Her and Curtis. She's a little shaken up, but she's fine."

Shaken up? What did they mean? Could Chris have been wrong? Could she have just heard Elvis sleeping off a sugar jag in the back? Could there really have been a reprieve?

"This is Sheriff Tipett. Chief there?"

Chris waited through the static-filled pause. It seemed that the town waited, hushed and heavy, the air thick with anxiety, the hesitation pulsing with the wash of distant rotors. Chris was sure everyone could hear the faint conversation issuing from beneath Mac's coat. She was sure most of all that Sandy could, sitting there in the dark with her knife at Shelly's throat.

Because no matter what she heard or hoped, Chris knew somewhere deep where her instincts lived that she was still in the right place.

"Uh, not right now, Sheriff..." John again. "We have the Axminster girl here, though."

Chris heard her own gasp. They had Shelly?

"And the suspect?"

"Negative. We're still searching. Chief wants you to, too."

Chris couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. If they had Shelly, who did Sandy have in there? What sacrifice had she prepared with her terrible knife?

Over the parabolic mike she heard the moan. Soft, hurt, echoing just a little. She recognized it. And she knew.

Her hands shook. Fury and fear clotted in her throat until she thought she would choke. Shelly had been a decoy. Sandy had orchestrated this moment with the precision of a choreographer. All that was left was for Chris to show up.

And she had no choice but to do it.

She had to go in. Now. Alone. She had to face whatever waited in those haunted little cells. Had to face the worms of madness that squirmed in her own cells of penitence.

With cold, clammy hands Chris reached up to remove her hat. She turned for the front of the sheriffs office, the main entrance to the jail where Sandy would be. She stepped up to the platform of her own execution knowing that even a glittering knife in the darkness wouldn't be as awful as what she was about to face.

The office was empty. The coffeemaker was on, the dregs burning away at the bottom and filling the room with a thick, acrid odor. The TV was tuned to CNN, and the dispatch screen was scrolled with calls, times received, times answered. The last time was twenty minutes earlier.

The radio crackled and muttered with all the calls that were being routed to different channels among the search teams out on the mountain and at the hospital seven miles down the road. The phone rang suddenly and went on ringing, unanswered. Chris had left the front door unlatched, and it swung open a little, letting in more stifling night air.

Chris wondered if Sue had reached John instead. She wondered whether John would be able to know what to do. She hoped he'd be able to save Mac's life. She wasn't at all sure Sandy would let her do it. She wasn't sure the rest of that crowd out there would give anybody the time to do it once they realized who was waiting in the sheriff's office where the dispatcher wasn't answering her phone.

Chris could smell her. Something feral, musty, like a stalking animal waiting in a lair. Back in the jail. Beyond the barely opened door where the lights had somehow gone out. Chris fought to stay silent. Battled back the bubbling terror like a lone survivor with her arms out against a flooding tide.

Sandy waited for her back there. Sandy with the answers Chris knew she didn't want. With the judgment she couldn't avoid.

Chris turned to the sheriff's office instead. Carefully twisted the knob and pushed the door open.

Marsha and Elvis looked up with identical terror in their wide eyes. Marsha's mascara had run down her gaunt cheeks. Elvis had a little smear of blood along his neck. Chris wondered whether his or somebody else's. They were both bound and gagged. Chris lifted a finger to her lips for silence and slid a knife from the sheath at her wrist. It took three quick swipes to cut the curtain cords that bound them. It took another silent warning to keep them from going right for their gags.

Chris motioned rather than spoke. She instructed them to get the hell out and leave the rest to her. She let them know she knew where the danger was. She wasn't about to let them know what she was going to do about it.

They did their best to keep silent as they crept for the front door. Chris knew they were heard. She also knew it didn't matter. They weren't part of the ritual. At least, not yet. And by the time they got help, it would be too late to make a difference anyway.

Chris got one more piece of information from Marsha before the dispatcher fled. Mac wasn't bound He was handcuffed. Chris would have to try and deal with it when she could.

She waited for the fading staccato of footsteps before turning back to her original goal.

It was hot in the office. Oppressive, the air old and congealed and prescient. It was so still, as if the molecules had stopped moving in anticipation of the confrontation. Chris imagined she could hear that careful breathing in the darkness, that coiled, waiting entity that for so long had lived only in her nightmares.

For just a moment, she squeezed her eyes shut. Leaned against the wall. Dropped her head and fought the overwhelming urge to run. Then with hands that shook as if she'd just discovered Dinah on her couch all over again, Chris pushed open the door into the jail.

Silence.

Empty, harsh silence. Chris reached around and flipped the switch for the overhead lights.

Nothing. She stood outlined in the doorway, her eyes trying to adjust to a blackness so deep it seemed she'd tumble right into it and never stop falling. She clutched at the rough cold stone of the wall with slippery hands and battled the terror.

"Mac?" she called quietly, her voice echoing flatly into the emptiness. Reverberating with the old echoes that waited there. The faint shrieks and moans and mutters, her own voice added to the echoes of decades. Suddenly she couldn't tell the difference anymore. She wasn't sure she knew which nightmare she was stepping into.

"Mac?" she whispered again, her voice raw as grief. "Mac, please answer me."

The voice that came out of the darkness was quiet, calm. "He's here."

Chris clutched harder, closed her eyes, opened them. Prayed for help. For... she didn't know what she could possibly pray for. She was at the brink of hell. It was too late to hope for redemption.

"Back in the dark," the voice continued evenly.

"No... please..."

"It's what you asked for. What you've planned ever since we walked away from that place." Such a seductive voice, sounding so reasonable, so assured. "You want to look in the dark, Christian. But you can't do it alone. You can't face the truth without me."

Whispering out of the blackness, out of the memories of madness and despair.

Chris teetered on the brink of hysteria, caught there like a wild thing between the darkness and the light. She wanted to laugh, to scream and run and fall down frothing with the insanity of it.

"There is no truth," she insisted instead, her voice louder now, edged with the steel of defiance.

"Of course there is," the voice answered as if it were Chris's own voice. Her own conscience come back to pay a final visit, echoing through the blackness like memory through her own skull. Faint, certain, so damnably reasonable. "It's why you've written your books. Why you've asked over and over again what it is that corrupts the soul to murder. I told you once, do you remember?"

Chris physically swayed with the pull of that voice, with the growing conviction that there really wasn't someone mortal attached to it. She sucked in a harsh breath, trying desperately to retrieve her shards of reality.

In the dark.

In the close, hot dark where monsters lived.

Where the world had disappeared in blinding, flashing seizures of electricity.

"I don't... all I remember is the... the dark, the fear, the smells... I remember..."

She couldn't. She couldn't survive this. The pictures had resurrected in the darkness. The shuddering of memory, disjointed, terrifying, humiliating. Faster and faster, threatening to overtake her. The awful moments of panic here when she'd lost control. When the blackness had closed in on her like the lid of a coffin, like earth on a grave, and she'd spat and shrieked and bucked. When she'd tried to bite Mac for holding her still for the needle.

Other memories, older, clearer than ever as if the darkness were the only place to allow them, bits and moments of memories that only served to stir the maelstrom of terror in her chest.

"What? What do you remember?"

Chris closed her eyes to escape the darkness and found only more. "Crying," she whispered on a ragged breath, tears splashing against her shaking hand. "Just sitting huddled over in the corner crying."

"Do you know why?"

She shook her head, even if no one could see, her eyes still closed. "No."

"Then we're not finished."

Chris shook her head, knowing the words. Knowing the next act.

"You can't have him, Sandy."

"Then you do remember me."

"I remember you."

"I'm glad. I thought for a while you hadn't. That all you'd meant to me had been lost, even after I'd waited for so long to find you again. After I'd planned and worked, even before you found me at the Ritz."

"The Ritz?"

"Of course. That first time, when you made the best-seller list and you and your agent were celebrating, and I was your waitress. You were sent to me so I could know that you hadn't completed the lesson. So I could read your books and know what you still needed. I took that second job with the police so I could keep track of how well I was doing, but it was worth it. It was all worth it, don't you think? Don't you think I did a good job?"

"You did a good job," Chris found herself saying, and then realized she'd said that before. Often, endlessly, back in the days when darkness had ruled.

Cards. Chris saw it again. The ragged, tooth-scarred deck with the jacks missing that she and Sandy had played with because there was nothing else to do. Poker, gin, anything, just to make the time go by. Always with a price, praise for the girl with the broken glasses, reassurance for the child with pleading eyes.

"Would you like me to sacrifice him for you?" the woman who had murdered her own parents asked. The woman who as a girl had bitten her own arms and waited by Chris's bed to make sure she was all right.

"I want to see him," Chris demanded.

It was getting harder to breathe. To think. To keep it all straight in her head. The terror swirled in her, red and hot and virulent. She could taste the familiar musk of atavism on her tongue. The beast at her core waiting to leap.

"No," her conscience answered. "He's here with me."

"I have to see..." Chris gulped in air, losing control. "I mean, how do I know there aren't..."