Paradise Falls (53 page)

They’d rammed the Aston Martin with the big, seafoam green Chrysler. The front end was mangled, both headlamps smashed out, but it looked drivable. She was about to find out, as the man pushed her into the open back door and threw it shut with a heavy, hollow slap. Jennifer pulled her legs in before the door closed on her feet, and she was cut off from the outside. There was a crack in the windshield, casting a long shadow through the interior. Jennifer sat up and looked around.

I need a piece of metal. A pick or a shim to get the lock open.

She watched, and she listened.

Their voices were muffled.

The big man did not speak. The older one did all the talking.

“Leave him here,” he said, looking at Jacob. “Get up to the house, fuck up anybody you find. I want that skinny twat’s sister, too. Understand?”

Katie!

The old one walked over and nudged Jacob with his foot, and rolled him into his back. He didn’t move. He was bleeding, badly, his shirt soaked in blood from his shoulder to his elbow. His wound must have come open. The old man fingered that knife, slid it an inch or two from the sheath, and Jennifer held her breath. If he pulled it she would have to find some way to distract him.

Wake up, Jacob
.

He threw her severed braid on Jacob’s stomach instead, and turned.

The roar of motorcycles vibrated the glass. There were more Leviathans approaching, Five, on motorcycles, another driving a big box truck. The big man flagged down the truck with a wave and climbed inside, and the rest of them went up the hill. The old man came around, opened the door and slid into the car, resting his arm on the seat. He turned to look at Jennifer. As he spoke her fingers, probed the seats, looking for anything she could use to get the cuffs open.

“You know who I am?”

Jennifer said nothing.

“Mike was my boy and you killed him, whore.”

“I didn’t want to,” she said. “I don’t want anybody to die.”

He snorted.

“Too fuckin’ bad.”

“What are you going to do to Jacob?”

He snorted.
 

“I’ll do him later. I want him to suffer first. Like I suffered,” his voice rose, “
You killed my son.”

“Your son killed a little girl,” said Jennifer, coldly. “He ambushed a couple in their car on their first date and slaughtered them like animals. He had his chance, and-“
 

His arm flashed over the seat and backhanded her. Pain exploded through her jaw, followed by the thump of her head against the window.

“Shut the fuck up,” he snarled. “Next time you run your mouth, I’ll carve up your face and leave your skinny ass there to bleed out next to him, understood?”

Jennifer nodded, without looking at him. Nor did she sit up.

In the distance, she heard gunshots, and flinched. She looked through the fringe of her roughly cut hair and watched Jacob lying on the ground, his face slack, eyes half open. He looked dead.

Wake up. Wake up. Please wake up. Wake up, my love.

This had to be a nightmare, but Jennifer had walked enough nightmares to know the ground beneath her feet was real. So she waited, and continued prodding the seats. Something, anything, just something to get the lock open. If she could get out she could run, run like the wind, get help. Call her friends. Somebody. Jacob was still lying there. His left arm was blood from shoulder to elbow, but his fingers moved. He was going to wake up.

Wake up. Do what you do
.

He didn’t wake up.

The box truck came rolling down the hill. Bikers mounted their bikes. The old man started the car.

The big man walked over and rapped on the windshield. The old man rolled it down.

“Got, her, Grinder.”

“Our bitches?”

“No just that one’s sister and some other twat,” he nodded at Jennifer. “Bitch
bit
me.”

“Any trouble?”

“No.”

“
Good. Stay here with the others in case he wakes up. When he does, just keep him alive. You do whatever you need to, but I want him alive. I want him to know what I did to her.”

Grinder rolled his window up.

He put the car in gear.

“You know where I’m taking you?”

Jennifer said nothing.

“Good, you remembered to shut the fuck up. First, I’m going to shoot your sister up with so much smack she doesn’t know what planet she’s on. She’s already been sold. First, before I do any of that, I’m gonna kill you. Slowly, and I’m gonna make the rest of them watch. What do you think of that?”

He likes to talk.

“Answer me!” he roared.

You told me not to talk.

Jennifer did not sit up. She continued to lean against the window and probe the seat. She found a coin, probably a quarter by the size and feel. Not even enough to make a phone call anymore. She dropped that and continued feeling around. There had to be something. This old rust bucket had to have a little piece of metal she could grab
somewhere
. She shifted on the seat and sat up, face down, staring at the floor, to better hide her movements.

Jennifer could do her trick again, fold her legs through the cuffs. It would hurt, but if she did that she could get the chain under his chin and choke him out.

No, that led nowhere. He’d see her doing it and kill her before she had the chance, and even if she did by some miracle overpower him, there were five, six, ten other men in the little convoy. She wasn’t sure. Bikes roared behind her, the box truck rolled on up ahead. Jennifer felt around and her wrist bumped her phone in her pocket.

My phone
.

They never searched her, never patted her down. If only she’d thought to tuck away something for the drive home, but it was all behind her seat, useless. Jacob was so worried about those weapons The Fangs were moving he forgot himself, and she was so worried about him that she forgot, too.

God,
she said silently,
what did I do to deserve this? First, Elliot destroys my happiness. Then my father is taken from me. Then I think I’m in love and I lose Franklin, twice. Then you bring Jacob to me and steal him away again. What did I do wrong?

Something hot itched on her cheek. Jennifer realized she was crying.

She jumped when something sharp cut into her finger. Something sharp, and hard, and
metal
. She leaned against the window and whimpered, though her heart rose as she felt along the edge, tugging. She didn’t know what it was, but it was there, metal and sharp. Some kind of a pin. No, it was attached to a tube. Glass.

A hypodermic needle.

She wanted to throw up. It broke her skin. Was she going to get sick? It didn’t matter. She felt the length of the needle and wiggled it until she had the tube pinned against something and snapped it off, wincing as she heard it break, but Grinder didn’t react. He just eyed her hungrily in the rear view mirror. Jennifer looked away.

Come on, work.

She slipped the end of the needle into the lock. She had to bend it to shape first, round it out without breaking it, but it was hollow, would that even work? Would it just snap?
Can’t pick it. I need a little loop to operate the lock
. She had to do it blind. When she practiced with Jacob she had a piece of wire he’d already shaped. He never showed her how to get it right, and without looking. She started by sticking the tip into the mechanism of the cuffs, bending it just a little, bending it a little more. Curling the end.

Over her shoulder, she saw a curve in the road. She’d been so intent on freeing herself she hadn’t looked.

Please be alive. I love you. Please be alive.

2.

Wake up, Jacob.

A voice rang in his head. He knew he was dreaming. The world around him made no sense.

Was this his dream?

No. He was in Jennifer’s house, the little duplex she rented, before she moved in with him. It was fuzzy, indistinct, more a palette of grays and colors than a place, resolving from his memory, taking shape like distant objects in fog. Books on cheap wire shelves, a pile of origami cranes and houses and animals like a garden of strange flowers, her crafting things and the pictures on the walls. Jacob thought that eidetic memory, a photographic memory, was a myth, but if it was possible to have such a thing, he did. The world cleared and he was standing there in her living room.

The window blew in, threw shimmering razor shards across the floor. They cut into his legs. He remembered this. She told him about the dream, whispered it to him in the dark. He turned around and headed the other way, to the back door.

Wake up, Jacob
.

He knew that voice.

Wake up, Jake.

Jennifer’s back door opened onto… his place. Tile floors, an expansive vault of a ceiling. Once there was a statue here in the very center of the fortress he built in his mind to shield himself from the knife. A goddess of crimson and cream, a distant memory of a boy’s lustful crush for an older woman. Now there was a bed and she was asleep in it, hair fanned out behind her in coppery waves, sometimes chestnut, sometimes fire, changing as the light caught it from different angles. She had such beautiful hair. She was so
real
.

 
Wake up, Jake.

He knew that voice. He followed it.

She was standing in one of the hallways. It was dark behind her, dark in front of her. He saw her through frosted glass, indistinct. His mother when she was younger. His sister when she was older than she would ever be. Maybe both, maybe neither. Raven haired, tall and slender, a small figure in front, his father standing behind and over them.

“Where the hell am I?”

“You gotta wake up, Jake.”

“I can’t. It hurts.”

He felt a presence behind him. He turned.

Earl Kittinger was a furniture salesman. He was of middling height and portly and he did not look like a master of a killing art. His brown eyes betrayed nothing as his fist rammed into Jacob’s stomach. He doubled over and fell back, almost dropped to the floor.

“Why do you recoil when I strike you?”

“Because it hurts,” Jacob said. His arms were skinny again.

“Why?”

“I don’t know-“

“Because you let it. Stand up.”

The next blow doubled him over again. Did his parents know this was happening?

“Again. What are you?”

“I’m… I don’t know,”

“You are a figure of wood. A figure of wood stands in the rain, in the snow, in the blazing heat, and feels
nothing
. Be the figure of wood, Jake.”

The next blow did not double him over. It hurt. He breathed anyway and it passed through him.

“I sense injuries. The data could be called pain.”

Kittinger smiled and said to him, “Now wake up, boy.”

His eyes flew open. He was not a figure of wood. He screamed.

The sun stung his eyes. The Aston Martin was a ruin, but the hell with that. Jennifer. Find. Her.

He rolled over and something fell off his stomach. He grabbed it. Some kind of rope. A cord. Strangely soft. It slipped through his fingers. He looked at his shoulder. He was badly hurt, bleeding. Get up, damn you. What did he have in his hand?

Not a rope.

Hair.

Oh God, it was Jennifer’s hair. Her braid. Somebody cut it off and tossed it on his stomach. Jacob recoiled, almost dropped it, clutched it instead. He put his hand on the car. He got up. Pain lanced down his left arm with every movement but the bone wasn’t broken, he was just bleeding. He was just cut. He’d been cut before. He had to get up the hill.

“He’s awake.”

Jacob turned.

“There you are, fucker.”

He didn’t see people. He saw a collection of problems. Difficulties to be solved. Two men approached him, walking slow. Biker leathers- vests, bare arms. They were armed. He could tell from their shifting gaits, the way they bore the weight of weapons on their hips, crudely stuck through their waistbands. They had their hands out, fingers tensing, muscles flexed, legs tight and coiled. They were going to grab him. They wanted him alive. Torture.

Somebody was about to be tortured and it was not Jacob.

A hand grasped his arm. The motion came to him naturally, like breathing. His left arm pained him all through it but he was a figure of wood and it passed right through him. He turned with a speed a wounded man should not have, moved, and brought himself under the offending arm. The man trying to grab him had a momentary flash of shock before Jacob pivoted and used his weight and bent the elbow the wrong way.
Snap
.

The reaction was fast, immediate, but Jacob was faster.

Action is always faster than reaction. Always.

He jabbed the other one in the throat. His hands shot up to grasp it. Instinct demanded the wounded throat be shielded, the breathing apparatus protected. That gave him time to duck, grab the strap on an engineer’s boot and pull. Jacob stood, and for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction. The biker fell. Jacob’s heel came down on his neck, and he walked calmly past the two screaming, flailing men to their motorcycles. One had the key in the ignition. He threw his leg over, started it, and opened the throttle. Smoke billowed behind him as the tire bit down and launched him up the hill.

He took the turns too fast, leaning into it, jamming on the brakes at the last minute to avoid dumping the bike when he hit the gravel. When he stopped he let it drop. It was no longer needed. Too bad about the paint job on the gas tank. He still had Jennifer’s braid in his hand. He walked up his front steps and threw his front door open and almost died.

The big, long haired man was waiting for him. He was the second in command of the Leviathans, the old man’s fixer. He came on fast.

He had several inches of height on Jacob and fifty pounds, all of it muscle. He was skilled in the untrained way of a veteran of many bar and street fights and went right for Jacob’s balance, bowling him over. By instinct Jacob went into a break fall, rolling down the front steps to land easily on his feet and fist before pushing back up. The big man reached behind his back to pull something. Knife or gun, it didn’t matter. It turned out to be a knife.