The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (22 page)

Ten yards from the gate, when he was just ready to veer off, the pair of flashlights grabbed his attention. One sprang from near the gate itself, and the other was halfway between it and the house and approaching. The snap of a lock being turned echoed in the night, and then the gate whined as it was drawn open.

“Yo, what’s going on out there?”

The question was posed by the lead guard bearing the flashlight, a big man in dark clothing who was now starting cautiously down the road.

“Hey, you hear me or not?”

The man picked up his pace as if incensed by Quail’s failure to answer him. The Dutchman slumped his shoulders, trying to look shorter. The guard stopped in terror when the flashlight caught his figure. He went for his gun, but the instant it took allowed Quail to rush straight up the beam. Needing to be quick, he killed the man in the same motion it took to toss him into the brush, then stooped over the body and retrieved the man’s cap. He tucked it over his head as best as he could manage and kept his masked face angled down as he moved toward the gate, making himself stagger.

Again his timing proved perfect. The approaching guard reached the gate a second before Quail, shifting his flashlight to the turf as the wounded figure seemed to stumble just outside the gate. As the man reached for the latch, Quail flung his hands through the gate and brought the man’s face viciously against the bars. He kept it there so the man couldn’t scream while pulling one hand back and angling his fingers into a steel ramrod that bit deeply into the flesh of the guard’s throat even as the second hand was already sliding down toward the latch.

“Everything’s all right,” Chaney told Lisa when he returned.

“How can you be sure?”

“The communications center hasn’t had a single report of anything gone wrong. With a dozen guards out there, we’d know if something had.”

“What about the other guards, the new ones?”

“Should be reaching the estate any second. Rest easy, miss. Nothing to fear out there except boredom.”

Lisa noticed the walkie-talkie Chaney had clipped to his belt.

He followed her eyes. “Can stay in better contact this way,” he explained.

“Which means you won’t have to leave the door again.”

“That’s the idea, miss.”

Chapter 20

QUAIL FOUND HIMSELF ALONE
on the grounds inside the fence and knew that all the remaining guards would be inside the house. One of them was sure to be mannning the communications center, and he was clearly a prime target. The Dutchman wanted time to deal with the woman as he wished, and an alarm sent to the mainland could bring help fast enough to make him rush.

Extensive and neatly manicured grounds enclosed the mansion. Clinging to the shadows, Quail eased himself toward the well-lit area of the main entrance, ears attuned to sounds of movement in case he had somehow missed any of the outside guards. Nearer the entrance, Quail crouched low. There were a pair of video cameras to concern himself with now, but with the proper timing he could reach the door by darting between their sweeps. Quail studied the cameras closely and, with their rotations spread widest, lunged.

The image on the video monitor looked like no more than a darkened shadow, a black splotch that went as quickly as it had come. The man in the communications room might have disregarded it altogether had not a red light and a warning buzzer alerted him to the fact that the front door had been penetrated.

“What the hell …”

His eyes swept across the other screens for hints of movement on the grounds among the floodlights. Nothing. No guards, no intruders. Why no guards, though? Could all of them be out of camera range at the same time?

Someone had entered the house, someone unfamiliar with the proper procedure for entry. It could have been one of the commandos just brought in and thus not briefed yet, but the console operator felt otherwise. No matter. The two interior guards were posted downstairs to handle any intrusion. The man flicked a pair of switches which brought the picture from the first floor onto two screens.

There were no guards visible on the monitors.
No one
appeared on the monitors. It was as if the intruder had moved between sweeps of the camera and used those motions to eliminate both interior guards in less time than …

Impossible! Or was it?

In the end it was a gnawing, all-encompassing fear that drew the man’s finger to a small black button that would automatically send an emergency message to Dominick Torelli wherever he was. The boss would take things from there. There was help just minutes away once the signal got through.

The man had just pressed the button when the door to the communications room eased quietly open.

Lisa was seated in a chair facing the door when the knock came. She had only just given up her futile attempts at rest and dressed in jeans and a blouse.

“It’s me, miss,” came Chaney’s now familiar voice.

She cracked the door open and gazed at his shadowy bulk in the dim light of the third-floor hallway.

“I’m having trouble with this box,” he explained, pointing at his walkie-talkie. “Can’t raise anyone.”

“What should you do?”

“Check things out a bit. Thought I heard something a few seconds ago.” The walkie-talkie was back in his belt in the next instant and a huge square pistol in its place. “Lock the door, miss. I’ll be right back.”

No, you won’t
, Lisa almost said, terrified by the certainty of her notion.

The black button brought no lights blazing or alarms shrilling, but Quail knew all the same that its signal meant trouble for him in the form of reinforcements of some kind. He killed the man behind the console by squeezing his headset well into his ears until the parted flesh swallowed the soft plastic ends, making them one with his skull.

His concern with the black alarm button had made him careless, though, and when he turned back toward the door, it was without proper consideration of his surroundings. He saw the gun come up before him and to the side, knew it was too late to prevent the shot and merely twisted to avoid the bullet as the large shape whirled before him.

Lisa heard the shot explode, echoing through the suddenly empty house. She waited as if certain there would be another, and when it didn’t come she was unsure of what this meant in terms of her own fate.

The terror within her was more than a feeling. It was alive and moving through her stomach and chest, wrapping around her lungs as if to shut off her breath. She found herself standing with her back against the wall without remembering getting up from her chair.

She had to do something herself, and she had to do it now.

Quail’s next conscious thought as the gun was pointed at him again was that its wielder was big, huge even, but still smaller than he was. He managed to lash his hand out in a blur and strike the gun on its hot barrel, surprising its holder with the power of the blow and tearing the weapon from his grip.

The man seemed fazed for only an instant, and he backpedaled agilely as the Dutchman lunged with his other hand. The man managed to deflect the blow with a lucky swipe, but the gun had been his only true hope, Quail knew, and he went for the kill.

Lisa sensed she was alone now and knew her best hope was that the killers didn’t know which room she was in and would thus have to check each door before reaching this one on the third floor. She briefly considered taking her chances in the corridors in an escape attempt through the main entrance, but she dismissed the notion when she realized it was the surest way of delivering herself straight into their hands. Then she thought of the roof. Would that do as an escape route? No—the slightest slip and a three-story plunge would await her. The key was to make a stand, lay a defense here. Take advantage of what she had already and find more to add to it while she clung to the hope that help would be coming from the mainland.

First things first. Holding her breath, she unbolted the heavy wood door and grabbed hold of the chair Chaney had been sitting on outside the room so there would be nothing to make this one stand out from the others on the hall. This done, she refastened the bolts and went to her handbag. Fighting to stay calm, she rummaged through it as she went toward the bathroom. Since this was only a guest room, its medicine cabinet and the area under the sink were not terribly well stocked, but she would make do.

The best she could salvage for her planned use was a can of Lysol spray disinfectant and a jar of Crystal Drano drain opener. Working fast now, making every second count, she dropped a capful of the Drano in each of two heavy-duty plastic cups and then filled both three-quarters full of water.

The hissing started instantly, followed almost as quickly by the rise of an incredibly noxious vapor. The addition of water to the crystals created dangerous lye, and she placed the two hissing cups in different parts of the room equidistant between the door and the window. Still hurrying, she shook up the can of Lysol spray and left it on the bureau. She remembered that she had seen a cigarette lighter on the dressing table. She picked it up and put it on the bureau next to the Lysol. Then she again turned her attention to her handbag. Tossing the contents about, she came up with a nail file and a Cross ballpoint pen, the kind you twist at the top to make the hard steel writing ball emerge. Both able weapons but only in close, and if it came to that…

Footsteps in the corridor! Gliding more than stepping, and coming straight toward her door. Lisa held her breath and fought hard to still her shaking. At the last moment she jammed the file into her hair just above her ear and clipped the pen to her belt.

No longer hearing the footsteps in the corridor, she padded lightly toward the door with the Lysol can in one hand and the lighter in the other. She was testing the lighter, watching the flame flick high, when the door exploded inward.

True to his word to Kimberlain, Dominick Torelli had arranged for his private helicopter to take him to the island as soon as the evening’s business was completed. The chopper was streaking toward St. Andrew Sound, with Crooked Bluff behind them, when the pilot handed him a headset.

“It’s for you, boss!” the man shouted over the chopper’s roar.

Torelli held the headpiece to his ear and mouth. He never spoke, just tossed the set aside, his face stiff with rage and determination.

“Step on it!” he ordered the pilot and turned to advise his bodyguards that he was leading them into a war.

Quail had known his time was severely limited, but he couldn’t make himself rush. Such a huge house, so many rooms. Every door on both the second and third floors was locked, as he expected them to be, and looking behind every one would waste too much time.

But how to know which door?

The answer didn’t come to him until he saw it. Halfway down the third-floor hall he found a pair of deep impressions on the carpet running down the center, as if a chair had been there until just minutes ago, occupied by a man of considerable weight. Quail smiled. The woman was clever to have removed the chair, but in that moment of cleverness had given away the fact that she was alone in the room.

Anticipation of the coming kill, of tearing the heart from her chest while it still beat, fueled Quail’s strength, and he flung himself against the wooden door.

Lisa was conscious only of his shape when the figure crashed through the door. She had no true grasp of his size and features yet, other than the bare minimum required to aim the Lysol spray nozzle up and forward—at his eyes. She struck the lighter and sent the spray outward in the same instant his attention settled upon her.

Perfect.

She heard herself screaming as the stream of Lysol was turned into a blow torch speeding toward the figure’s face. The flames illuminated it briefly before getting there and she noted, strangely, that it didn’t look like a face at all. Worse, she had misjudged the figure’s incredible size, so the flames reached him low and missed the eyes, striking lower around the nose and mouth.

Quail squealed in terror and agony as the flames struck him. His beginnings came back in the blue-orange flash, the night the flames had swallowed him in their fury and his new self had been born. But his new self couldn’t be stopped by anything now, including flames, so he determined to race into the jet of fire, swiping at it boldly as if to knock the flames aside.

Lisa saw the arm flailing toward her and flinched, pressure on the lighter lost, reducing the Lysol to mere scent again. A pair of hands black with gloves were reaching for her as she abandoned the Lysol and reached toward the lamp stand holding the first of the plastic cups containing the liquified Drano. Her eyes were already burning from its hissing vapors as she drew it forward in line with the figure’s face.

That face … There was something horribly wrong with the face.

The cup’s contents sprayed out and forward. Some flew past the figure in black, but enough found his face to bring another scream and send his hands flailing up in the direction of his eyes.

I’ve done it!
Lisa thought and started round him toward the door. She sensed that he was the only attacker, that he alone had somehow killed or disabled all the guards posted around her.

He reached out and grabbed hold of her just before she reached the corridor. Not a tight grasp, but firm enough to draw her back into the room and toss her against the wall near the window she had opened to allow some of the noxious Drano vapors to escape. Her eyes gazed up into a terrifying visage—what looked like white latex strips hanging from the monster’s face. She knew now that it had been a mask the Drano had melted and not flesh, and what lay beneath the latex was … hideous.

In the darkness broken only by the spill of light through her window, Lisa could see that the monster had no face, just eyes pounded into something ghastly and unreal. She blessed the darkness for keeping that sight from her, but she couldn’t prevent the bottomless scream that escaped from her throat. Despite the terror she managed to find and launch the second cup of her Drano mix straight at the monster’s head.