Pines (20 page)

A week from now when she wakes in the middle of the night, alone in her dark bedroom, with no possibility of ever seeing her husband again...

What will she tell herself?

Ethan rushed through the next intersection, more lights appearing every time he glanced back, but his nearest pursuer—the hurdler—was his immediate concern. The man had broken ahead of his slower compatriots, Ethan thinking he looked familiar—the bald head, the huge, silver-frame glasses—and as the man closed to within thirty feet, Ethan realized who it was: that prick pharmacist he’d tried to buy aspirin from two days prior.

Main Street loomed one block ahead, a disturbing noise bubbling up over the two- and three-story buildings—the ebullient chatter of a gathering crowd.

Under no circumstances could he run naked onto Main Street.

But at his current clip and without altering his trajectory, in another twenty seconds he would do that very thing.

One street stood between Ethan and Main, and it wasn’t even a street—just a one-lane alley that slashed behind the row of buildings. It gave him one last boost of rage-infused adrenaline to acknowledge that if he rounded the corner into that alley and came upon anybody, anybody at all, he was done.

Hacked to death by a machete-wielding pharmacist.

Nice way to go.

A one-story garage abutted the street, and he figured the corner of the building, when he turned it, would break the pharmacist’s line of sight for about two seconds.

If there wasn’t a crowd waiting for him in the alley, it might be enough.

Ethan had been sprinting up the dead center of the street, but now it was time to make his move.

He veered right, cutting across the rain-slicked pavement.

Must not fall.

Crossed a strip of grass, then sidewalk, then grass again, and as he reached the opening of the alley, it occurred to him that he didn’t even know what he was going to do.

No time to plan. Just react.

By the proximity of the man’s footfalls, he estimated the pharmacist to be six strides back.

Ethan shot into the alley.

Concrete to dirt.

Darker.

Mist tinged with the reek of wet garbage.

He saw no one in the immediate vicinity beyond a pair of flashlights several hundred feet down, meandering his way.

Ethan kicked his feet sideways and parallel, as if shredding to a stop on skis, arresting his forward momentum as he skidded to such an abrupt halt he could feel gravity fighting to flip him end over end.

He righted himself and exploded back the way he’d come, accelerating straight at the corner of the building.

Be there. Be there. Be there.

The collision was tremendous, Ethan’s forehead smashing flush into the lower half of the pharmacist’s jaw in a bone-fracturing wreck so intense the impact left Ethan out on his feet for half a second.

He snapped back, blood sheeting down his face.

The pharmacist sitting stunned and spitting teeth onto the road.

In the aftermath of the brain-scrambling hit, it took Ethan two seconds to realize that the long, metal object lying on the pavement was the man’s machete.

He reached down and lifted it as the man looked up at him, the horror of knowing what was about to happen dragging him back into coherence more effectively than a bucket’s worth of smelling salts.

Ethan squeezed his fingers into the indentations in the machete’s handle, which had been wrapped in duct tape for improved grip in the rain.

The man raised his arms in a feeble attempt to fend off what could not be fended off.

Ethan feigned a strike and drilled the man in the face with a front kick, his heel thrusting through the wreckage of the man’s crushed nose and driving the back of his head into the pavement with a skull-fracturing crunch.

The man groaned and stayed down, but his two friends were closing in—they’d be here in ten seconds—and behind them, a block back, that army of flashlights moved like a herd of cattle up the street, the sound of numerous footfalls on wet pavement getting louder and louder.

Ethan fled back into the alley, relieved to find that those pair of lights he’d seen last time had vanished.

He ran, needing to make the most of this brief window of invisibility.

Twenty steps in, he neared a Dumpster and didn’t even hesitate.

Ducked around the side, hit the ground, crawled behind it, wedging himself between the metal and the brick wall of the building it nestled against.

He couldn’t hear anything over the thundering of his heart and his doglike panting, sweat and blood pouring down his face into his eyes, freezing, muscles blazing with a lactic acid burn like he’d just hit the wall on a marathon.

Footsteps raced past on the other side of the Dumpster and the sound of them moving away, getting steadily softer, was like music.

The side of Ethan’s face rested on the ground, dirt and bits of glass and gravel embedding in his cheek.

Rain drummed on his back and collected all around him in pools that shivered with each new droplet.

He could’ve lain there all night and long into the following day.

Get your ass up. You can’t afford to get stiff.

Ethan placed his palms on the wet gravel and struggled up onto his hands and knees.

He backed out of the space between the Dumpster and the building and crouched for a moment beside the trash bin, listening.

Distant voices.

Distant footsteps.

The commotion on Main.

But nothing sounded dangerously close.

He stood, glanced back toward the opening of the alley, and saw the crowd moving past at a jog, climbing the street toward whatever was happening on Main.

Keeping close to the brick wall, Ethan headed in the opposite direction, into the misty darkness of the alleyway.

Thirty feet down, there was a break in the brick—a wooden door.

He looked back toward the Dumpster, to the street beyond.

Now someone was coming—a beam of light sweeping back and forth across the alley, coupled with the crunch of gravel under footsteps.

Ethan tugged the door open, light from inside throwing a patch of illumination into the alley that diffused through the mist.

He rushed through and into a bright stairwell, pulled the door closed after him, and turned to flip the dead bolt.

The cylinder had been drilled out like a cavity and filled in with solid metal.

No way to lock it.

Ethan raced up the narrow stairwell, the stress of climbing sending new shoots of pain through the back of his left leg.

As he reached the second-floor landing, the alleyway door burst open.

Ethan glanced back down the stairs at a large man standing in a dripping yellow poncho, flashlight in one hand, a butcher knife Ethan figured he’d liberated from a home cutlery block in the other.

The man’s eyes stayed hidden under the shadow of the hood, but his jaw was set and his hands, particularly the one holding the knife, were rock-steady, betraying no evidence of nerves.

Ethan rushed across the landing and up the next set of steps as the stairwell filled with the reverberation of booted footfalls.

On the third-floor landing, Ethan crashed through a doorway.

The corridor stood quiet, empty, dimly lit.

Sconces that resembled lanterns had been mounted to the wall at intervals of twenty feet.

Brass numbers centered on each door.

An apartment building?

Ethan heard the footsteps pounding up the stairwell.

Started down the hallway, trying every doorknob he passed.

Locked.

Locked.

Locked.

Locked.

Knowing any second the stairwell door would break open.

Locked.

Locked.

The seventh door he tried, number nineteen, turned.

He tightened his grip on the machete in the event someone waited on the other side, and nudged the door open with his toes.

A small, dark apartment.

Seemingly empty.

He slipped inside and shut the door at the same moment the stairwell door punched open.

Ethan reached up, hooked the chain into the guard.

Lingering by the entrance, he listened as the door out in the hallway swung closed.

The footsteps slowed considerably.

Knocking against the hardwood floor.

No more rushing.

No frantic pounding.

Ethan could almost picture the man in the yellow poncho moving methodically down the corridor. He had to know that Ethan had slipped into one of the apartments, but he’d have no way of knowing which one.

The footsteps approached—

And now that this one was locked as well...

—and stopped on the other side, close enough that when Ethan looked down he could see the light slipping under the door broken in two places.

How the hell had the man known exactly where to stop?

Shit.

Muddy footprints.

One of the foot shadows on the floor disappeared and the hardwood in the corridor creaked from wood pressure.

Ethan staggered back, slipping around the right-hand corner into a kitchenette.

The sound of splintering wood.

The chain snapping.

Light from the corridor poured into the dark apartment.

Yellow Poncho had kicked the door in.

Standing with his back against a humming refrigerator, Ethan could see the silhouette of the man’s shadow yawning across the carpeting into the apartment.

The shadow lengthened as the man stepped over the threshold and moved slowly down the short hallway that opened into a living area.

Several feet back from the kitchen, he stopped.

Ethan could hear his poncho dripping on the carpet, the man’s elevated breathing as Ethan tried to suppress his own.

A soft click, and then a beam of light shot into the living area and tracked slowly across the wall where bookshelves surrounded two large windows, presently curtained.

Through them, Ethan could hear the noise down on Main steadily increasing.

The light struck a leather sofa and a coffee table, upon which a mug on a coaster exhaled coils of steam that filled the apartment with the sleepy sweetness of chamomile tea.

The light moved across a framed photograph—an aspen grove in full autumn color, snow-dusted mountains in the backdrop, October sky burning blue above it all—and then swept into the kitchen, passing over the stove, cabinets, coffeemaker, gleaming off the stainless-steel sink on its way toward Ethan.

He ducked, crawled across the linoleum, and crouched in the shadow between the island and the sink.

The man came forward, Ethan watching the light beam strike the refrigerator where he’d been standing five seconds ago.

The footsteps moved on.

In the microwave door above the stove top, Ethan locked on the reflection of the man in the yellow poncho who now stood in the living area, staring toward a doorway in the north wall that opened into a bedroom.

Ethan struggled slowly onto his feet, the noise of the crowd masking the popping of his knees. He stood facing Yellow Poncho’s back as the man edged forward with careful purpose toward the bedroom.

Ethan crept around the island and then out of the kitchen.

At the coffee table, he stopped.

Yellow Poncho stood in the threshold of the bedroom, twelve feet away, shining his flashlight into the room.

Ethan tightened his grip on the machete’s duct-taped handle and scraped the pad of his thumb over the edge of the long blade.

It could’ve been sharper. A lot sharper. He’d have to swing hard.

Go. Rush him. Right now while you still have the element of surprise.

He hesitated.

Ethan had caused plenty of suffering and death, but the raw intimacy of violence was diluted from the cockpit of a Black Hawk. Sending laser-guided Hellfires into a target two miles away wasn’t in the same wheelhouse as killing a civilian with a machete in close quarters like this.

One was a few steps above a video game. The other—

The man spun around in the doorway and faced Ethan.

Both men started breathing faster.

“Why are you doing this?” Ethan asked.

No response.

He couldn’t see anything of the man’s face now.

Just his profile, the shadow of the knife in his right hand, and a splash of illumination on his boots, the flashlight aimed at the floor.

Ethan had opened his mouth to repeat the question when the light swung up, blazing straight at his face, into his eyes.

Something clattered to the floor.

Darkness resumed.

Ethan couldn’t see anything against the retinal overload, standing blind in a gray darkness without form or detail.

Footsteps were coming, the hardwood floor under the carpet straining with each stride, the man’s jeans swishing as he charged.

Ethan staggered back, his vision recovering.

Captured a snapshot of Yellow Poncho three feet away, the butcher knife cocked back and poised for a downward strike.

Ethan swung—a hard, lightning slash.

The blade met no resistance, and the force of the swipe spun him around and off balance, Ethan thinking,
I missed. I’m dead.

The man moved past him, stumbling awkwardly across the room until he finally caught himself on the bar side of the kitchen island.

Ethan regained his balance, and as he improved his grip on the machete, making certain it was sound, he noticed blood dripping off the end of the blade.

Ethan looked back toward the kitchen.

The man had dropped his knife and was facing Ethan, leaning back against the island, both hands clutching the left side of his neck, which made a hissing sound like compressed air escaping from a tire.

Ethan backpedaled to the bedroom doorway, squatted down, lifted the flashlight off the carpet.

He put the beam on the man in the yellow poncho.

The amount of blood was staggering.

It resembled a red spiderweb on the yellow plastic of the jacket, expanding like a time-lapse of a replicating virus, running off in a dozen separate trickles and pooling on the floor. The blood issued from a six-inch gash across the intersection of the man’s shoulder and neck, blood spraying from one end in a fine mist and jetting out from the other in pulses of bright arterial red, the arc of each spurt diminishing as the man’s heart rate crashed.