No Safe House (42 page)

Nobody had said a word the entire trip.

“Take the keys,” Vince ordered me.

Reggie removed them and handed them over. I tucked them into the pocket of my pants as I got out of the car.

“Close the garage,” Vince said, and she hit the button to make the door rattle down behind us.

In the garage, there was another door that led into the house.

“This your house?” Vince asked.

Wyatt nodded. “We live here.”

I tried the door, but it was locked. “Which one is it?” I asked Reggie, holding her keys in front of her.

She pointed. “That one.”

I inserted it into the lock and turned. The door was unlocked, but before I could push it open, Vince said, “Wait.”

“There’s no one else here,” Wyatt said. “There’s no other car.”

“Go in first,” Vince told him, and Wyatt did as he was told. I went after him, then Reggie, and as always Vince was last.

We’d come into a laundry room off the kitchen. Just ahead of us, a set of stairs led down.

Vince shouted, “Jane!”

“She can’t talk,” Wyatt said.

His face went dark. “Where is she?”

Reggie said, “Downstairs.”

“Let’s go.”

We went, in our regular formation, to the basement. We were in a wood-paneled rec room with a Ping-Pong table, a couple of old couches, and a big-screen TV on the wall. There was also a long desk set up with three laptops on it, and stacks of what looked like tax forms. For their IRS tax refund scam, I guessed.

“In there,” Wyatt said, pointing to a door on the far side of the room. “It’s a bedroom.”

“I’ll watch them,” I offered, training my Glock on the two while Vince crossed the room.

He put his hand on the doorknob, held it there for a second, as if afraid to see what was on the other side. But then he gripped it and swung it wide.

We all looked.

At the empty chair, with lengths of rope scattered around it on the floor.

WHEN
Jane Scavullo heard the door open upstairs, sensed footsteps coming into the house, she wanted to be hopeful. Right away, she could tell by the sounds overhead that there was more than one person entering. Two, maybe more, pairs of footsteps. That in itself was neither good news nor bad. Yes, it could be Wyatt and Reggie returning. But it could also be Vince, with at least Bert and Gordie in tow.

But her gut told her it was not going to be Vince, or Bert, or Gordie.

Her instincts turned out to be partly right. It wasn’t Vince and his crew. But it wasn’t Wyatt and Reggie, either.

That was confirmed as soon as she heard someone speak.

“I’m gonna kill the little bitch.”

The voice wasn’t quite the same as she remembered it, but she knew who it was.

Joseph was back.

Not exactly who she was expecting. Jane figured Joseph and Logan were out of the picture indefinitely while Joseph got
patched up at the hospital. This was not a welcome development, particularly considering that there was no indication Reggie and Wyatt were here. Sure, maybe they were going to kill her anyway, but Jane believed Reggie might be quicker about it.

She was not confident Joseph would be merciful.

She heard running down the stairs. Then, seconds later, she sensed the door opening. A quick rush of air.

Before a word was said, someone grabbed hold of the hood over her head and yanked it off. The lights in the room had been turned on, and it took Jane a few seconds of rapid blinking to become accustomed. She’d been in darkness for hours now.

God, what a sight he was.

There were splotches of dried blood on Joseph’s shirt, his neck, his cheeks. If he’d made any attempt to clean himself, he hadn’t done a very good job.

Then there was the nose itself.

Jane couldn’t see much of it, hidden as it was under a wallet-sized wad of gauze and white medical tape, much of it smeared with blood. Jane wondered whether the emergency room doctor had been blind. This was the worst example of first aid she’d ever seen.

“I’m gonna enjoy this,” Joseph said, standing a foot away, waving a finger in her face. He sounded as though he had the world’s worst head cold.

Logan appeared at the door, stepped in, and placed his hands on his brother’s shoulders, pulled him away.

“Just hold on, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “You’re a goddamn fool, you know that? A goddamn fool.”

“I’m gonna do her,” he told him.

“Yeah, yeah, I get that. It’s all you’ve said the last two hours. What the hell were you thinking, walking out of the ER? Another ten minutes and someone would’ve looked after you.”

“I took care of it,” Joseph said.

“Oh yeah, right.” Logan looked at Jane. “You see what he did? Bought some bandages and shit and tried to patch himself up because he couldn’t wait to get back here and take care of you. Damn, why’d you have to go and do that to him?”

“Get out of my way,” Joseph said, although it sounded more like,
Geb ou da my may
.

He lunged at Jane, went to put his hands around her neck. He got his hands on her for half a second before his brother ripped him away.

“Listen to me!” Logan shook his head in exasperation. “I get why you want to do this. If it was me, I’d want to kill the bitch, too. But you can’t! Okay? You just can’t. We don’t know if the time’s right.”

“Let go.”
Leb doh
.

“Listen! They’re not back yet. Until they’re back, we don’t know if everything’s gone down okay.”

“It’s been too long.”

“Not
that
long. Maybe they ran into a complication. Maybe Fleming was late, had trouble rounding up the money. But here’s the thing. They might still need her. Like, maybe the guy says he’s got the money but he gets a bug up his ass about being able to talk to her on the phone before he hands it over or says where it is. Something like that. So what happens if they phone wanting us to put her on and you’ve already gone and wrung her neck? You want to fuck that up? You want us to lose out on the money? We’re this close, Joseph. We’re this close.”

“She broke my nose,” he said.

“I know, I know—I understand. I’m sure, when the time comes, Reggie’ll be okay with letting you do it. But you can’t do it
now
.”

“Call them,” Joseph said.

“What?”

“Call them and see if they’ve got the money. If they’ve got the money, I can do it now.”

“I’m not going to call them,” Logan said. “We wait to hear from them.”

“What if something went wrong?” Joseph asked. “What if the cops got involved? What if they got picked up? Maybe the cops are on the way here. That’s why we need to take charge. We need to do her now, because she needs to pay for what she did to me, and because we don’t want her talking to nobody about what she knows.”

Jane made desperate noises behind the tape. She wanted to make some kind of deal. Tell them something that might get them to change their minds.

“Shut the fuck up,” Joseph snapped at her.

Logan was thinking. That last part Joseph said, about the possibility that something had gone wrong, was worrying him.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we could do.”

“What?”

“Well, we were never going to kill her here. We talked about taking her out in the woods, doing it there. We could start heading out that way. Get her out of here, put her in the back of the Lexus, make the drive. Sooner or later they’ll call and say it’s done, and we can finish her. And in the meantime, if they need her to say something on the phone, we’ve still got her.”

Joseph’s entire body seemed electrified, like someone who’d had far too much caffeine. He was so itching to do this.

“When you said ‘we finish her,’ you mean me, right? I get to do her. I’m the one who gets to do her.”

Logan smiled, nodded slowly, tried to calm him down. “You’re the man, Joseph. You’re the man. Let’s get her out of this chair.”

Joseph managed a tortured smile under all the gauze and blood. “You’re a good brother, Logan. You really are. I don’t tell you enough.”

“YOU
happy?” Reggie asked. “She got away. So we’re good.”

Vince stepped into the downstairs bedroom to examine the empty chair and the bits of rope while I stood, gun in hand, in the rec room, watching Reggie and Wyatt.

“There’s blood,” Vince said.

“That’s from Joseph,” Wyatt said. “He was gushing it. Your girl broke his fucking nose when she head-butted him.”

Vince came out of the room, looked over at the table supporting the computers and tax files. A landline phone was sitting on it. Vince walked over, picked up the handset, put it to his ear, then hung it back up.

“Dial tone,” he said.

“So?” Reggie said.

I knew what he was getting at. “Jane would have called,” I said.

Vince glanced my way. “Yeah. If she’d got loose, she’d have called my cell, let me know.”

“Maybe not,” Reggie argued. “More likely, she was scared, wanted to get out of here as fast as she could. She didn’t want to take the time to do it.”

Vince raised his arm, aimed the gun at Reggie’s head. “Bullshit. You’ve got five seconds to find out where she’s gone.”

She didn’t blink. “How the fuck am I supposed to know? When I left, she was here.”

“Four seconds.”

“You remind me of my father,” she said coldly. “May he continue to burn in hell.”

“Three seconds.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Wyatt shouted. “It has to be Logan and Joseph.”

Reggie looked at him. “They went to the hospital.”

Wyatt looked at Vince. “I’ll call him. I’ll find out. Just put the fucking gun down.”

“Before you call,” Vince said, “here’s what you’re going to say.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“Say there’s been a hitch. Tell them I’m ready to hand over the money, but not until I see Jane. Not talk to her on the phone.
See
her.”

“I don’t even—I don’t even know for sure they’ve got her,” he protested.

“I’m going to shoot your wife in the head,” Vince said.

I had no doubt. He’d been hanging on by his fingernails for too long. Part of me wondered whether Vince just wanted to kill somebody. Didn’t matter who.

“Wait wait wait,” Wyatt said. He reached for the landline phone, entered a number.

“It’s ringing,” he said. “It’s still ringing. Just stop pointing that gun at my—Logan! Logan, is that you? Where—? No, I don’t have the money yet but we almost—Just shut up for a second! Where
are you? We just got back to the house and the girl’s gone … Why did you do that …? He didn’t go to the hospital? Is he a total idiot? Yeah, okay, we agree, he is … You have to bring her back … He can’t do that! Are you hearing me? I know he’s pissed, but you can’t let him do that. We don’t get the money until he sees the girl … Yeah, okay, we’ll talk about that after.”

Vince whispered to Reggie, “Get on the phone and tell them to get back. I get the feeling you’re the one everyone takes orders from.”

She glared at him, then took the receiver from her husband and said sharply, “Logan! You and your brother better be back here in five minutes with that girl or your share is fuck all! You got that? Nothing! You get nothing. Not fifty percent, not twenty-five, not ten. Nothing.” She waited while this sunk in with Logan. Reggie put her other hand over the phone and said to Vince, “He’s talking to his brother. He just has to—Yeah, I’m here.”

Back on with Logan. “The plan? Get your ass back here with her. By then we’ll have worked out how we’re going to show her off. Maybe a video thing with my phone. Don’t you worry about that.” She listened for another second, then lowered her arm. The call was over.

“He’ll do it,” she said to the rest of us.

Vince asked, “Where are they now?”

“About ten miles north. They were heading up toward Naugatuck, the state forest.”

“They were going to execute her in the woods,” Vince said.

Reggie’s eyes had gone dead. “Yeah.” She swallowed. “But we stopped that. They did that without my say-so. That was
not
supposed to happen.”

“Not this soon, you mean.”

She had no comment. Maybe she knew lying was pointless now.

I’d been feeling uneasy since Grace’s call to me the night
before, and could barely get my head around all the things that had happened since. But right now, at this moment, even though Vince and I had the upper hand, I felt myself in a darker place than any I’d been in up to now.

I needed to know how this was going to end. Vince was a man with little left to lose. I was on board with getting Jane back here, but then what? Assuming Vince got her safely released, what was the next step? What was he going to do with Wyatt and Reggie? With this Logan and his brother, Joseph, who I’d yet to set eyes on?

The clock was ticking toward a bloodbath.

“Vince,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“So talk.”

My eyes went to the other two, then back to him. He got the message. He said to Reggie and Wyatt, “Lie down.”

“What?”

“Both of you. Get down on the floor, facedown—not too close to each other—and spread your arms and legs out, like you’re starfish.”

After our two hostages did as they were told, he said to me, “What?”

I drew him back toward the door of the bedroom where Jane had been held, far enough away that if I whispered, they wouldn’t hear me.

“How does this end?” I asked.

“We get Jane back.”

“Yeah, of course. But after that. What happens then?”

His eyes bored into mine. “I guess we’ll see.”

“I can’t be part of that,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to. It won’t be enough to get Jane back. You’re going to want revenge.”

“Justice,” he corrected me.

“You can’t kill four people.”

“They were planning to kill me and Jane. And rip me off for everything I had. You think I should just send them to bed without a story?”

I gave my head a short, adamant shake. Even considering this pair had murdered the teachers, I wasn’t about to take on the job of being their judge, jury, and executioner. Maybe, once this was over, there’d be a way to point the cops in their direction. An anonymous call, something.