The Last Noel (10 page)

“Hey, Scooter, get back down here,” Craig called.

He was gripping the banister to stay upright, David realized. He didn't look well, but he was basically fit, and he was still on his feet, despite being hurt and then left out in the car.

Scooter had defended Craig, David mused. And Quintin didn't trust him. He filed that information away for later.

Scooter appeared at the top of the stairway, the boys in front of him, and looked down. “Do smoke detectors beep?” he asked Quintin.

“Of course they beep,” David answered. He hoped he had just the right note of impatience in his tone.

“Do they?” Quintin asked him.

David frowned, hoping he was a decent actor. His pulse was pounding, and he realized that Quintin might not have to kill him, because he felt ready to have a heart attack all on his own. “A smoke detector beeps when you need to replace the battery,” he said.

“Then why isn't it still beeping?” Scooter asked loudly.

“Because the battery beeps slowly at first, to warn you,” David answered.

“Did you look around up there?” Quintin demanded.

“Of course,” Scooter said.

“And?”

“I didn't find anything.”

“Then get back down here.”

“All right. One more minute.”

David swallowed hard. Was Kat about to be discovered? And that beep…

Had her phone
worked?

Knowing he had to do something, David got up and started to walk toward the stairs.

“Where the hell are you going?” Quintin demanded.

“Upstairs.”

Quintin shook his head. “You stay right here.”

“Look, I know what the problem is. I can show Scooter, so you two don't have to be worried about anything going on.”

“I'll go,” Craig said.

“What? Are all you people deaf or just stupid? I said you stay here,” Quintin snapped.

David forced himself to sit back down calmly, then looked over at Skyler. She looked scared, her eyes too wide as they met his. He hoped Quintin wouldn't notice and realize something was going on.

She must have realized the danger, too, because she looked away and trailed her fingers over the piano keys. “Come on, guys, hurry up,” she called. “It's time for Irish music.”

“Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…” Uncle Paddy began.

 

Scooter was prowling around the room again. Kat could hear him from her hiding place in the closet.

“Please, come on,” Jamie begged, real fear in his voice. “Didn't you hear him? Your friend is starting to sound dangerous.”

“Starting?” Scooter said distractedly. “He always sounds dangerous. He is dangerous.”

“So let's get down there.”

“I'm telling you, I heard something beep.”

“What? You think we have a bomb?” Frazier demanded.

“I think something's…not right,” Scooter said.

“Please,” Jamie begged. “Can we just go back downstairs?”

Kat willed herself to be perfectly still. She prayed her heartbeat wasn't as loud as it sounded to her own ears.

The floorboards creaked as Scooter kept walking around her room. It felt like forever, though it was certainly only seconds, before the closet door was flung open once again and he started pushing the hangers around.

Any second now, he would find her, and then they would all be dead.

Kat could almost feel him as he reached for the comforter on top of her. She felt the pressure as his fingers closed around it, and then she heard a scream as the entire house was pitched into darkness.

The power had gone out at last.

“H
ell of a night,” Deputy Sergeant Sheila Polanski said, rubbing her hands together in a vain attempt to warm them.

The power at the sheriff's office had gone out long ago. They had switched over to their emergency generator smoothly enough, but since everything was run at taxpayer expense, the emergency generators didn't allow for much heat.

And they called it
Tax
achusetts.

Hell, she called her beloved home state Taxachusetts herself, but even so, the state budget didn't kick in much to supply heat for this particular sheriff's office out in the country. They were small and located in an area where there was seldom trouble, so they were expected to run on a shoestring.

There was only one person answering to her tonight: Tim Graystone. Tim had managed to pull the Christmas Eve gig by being their newcomer. Young and raw, only on the job for a month. And honestly, it wasn't as if his inexperience mattered. This area was sparsely populated and too far east to share the crimes that faced their neighbors in ski country, where an abundance of tourists made an appealing target for theft. And they were too far west to run into the troubles that Springfield, with its larger population, had to deal with.

Then again, Sheila had learned in her twenty years of duty, anything could happen. Three years ago, Barry Higgins, as mild mannered as they came under most circumstances, drank too much and shot up the civic center, killing his own minister in the process. In '95, Arthur Duggan had murdered his wife. That had been sad, but bound to happen. The best minds and hearts in social services had tried to get her to swear out a warrant against her husband, not to mention leave him. They'd told her over and over again that he would kill her one day, and finally he had.

But those were the only two violent crimes that had ever come their way. So even though they were a skeleton crew, it didn't seem likely that young Tim would have much to deal with tonight. The phone and electric lines were down, and the storm continued to rage. There wasn't much for them to do other than sit around and bitch about the weather.

Tim grinned. He was a good-looking fellow, just turned twenty-seven. Despite a hitch in the service, he'd gone through the academy and college before joining the force here, reporting to Sheriff Edward Ford. All told, there were only twelve officers working the county, six by day and six by night, though the schedule didn't mean much, because they were always subbing for one another. Edward, as the boss and the only duly elected official, usually stepped up to the plate and took Christmas Eve duty, but he had just remarried and the new Mrs. Ford, though forty, had decided to procreate. So Edward and his bride were already checked into one of the many offshoots of U Mass Medical, awaiting the new little Ford.

As a result, Sheila was working with Tim tonight. He was working here because, after his time in the service, he had come home to find his father dying of heart disease, leaving his mother alone to raise his much younger sister. He'd decided to stick around to guide her through the teenage years and throw some financial support his mother's way. Sheila didn't warm to just anyone, but Tim, she liked.

If she'd ever been able to have kids, she would have wanted one like him. But she hadn't been able to, and her husband had left her because of it.

She sat down, though she had been pacing back and forth to keep warm. Tim might have been living in warmer climes for the last few years, but he didn't seem to feel the cold. He was seated at a desk, his fingers laced behind his head and his feet propped up.

“Met any women up here yet?” she teased.

He shrugged. “A few. How about you?”

“How about me what?” Sheila asked.

“When are you going to get remarried?”

“Tim, look at me. I'm sixty-two years old, and I look like a mop. Bone thin, and my hair's gray and frizzy.”

“You've got great blue eyes,” he said, then leveled a finger at her. “And we're off at six. You can sleep for a few hours, then drag your butt out of bed and come on over. My mom's an expert with a turkey.”

“Maybe. You don't have a bunch of old geezers coming over to try to fix me up with, do you?”

“No—and I'm not asking you to find anyone for me, either. Just a nice Christmas dinner.”

She shrugged.

“You're coming?”

“Sure,” she said, then jumped as Tim dropped his feet to the floor with a thump and sat up straight to stare at the computer screen.

“What is it?” she demanded.

“Look at that,” he said.

Their emergency phone lines went straight to the computers once the power went down and the generators kicked in, though it was a makeshift system that only let them receive calls, not respond or call out. Now they both stared at the screen, which registered a text message sent from a cell phone.

Help. Emergency. 225 Elm.

“Two-two-five Elm,” Tim said.

“The O'Boyle place. They always come up from Boston for the holidays. This had better not be another damn prank like the one their kid pulled last year.”

Tim looked at her. “I suppose there's no chance we can—”

“Wait to check it out? No such luck. Bundle up, buddy. Duty calls.”

“Okay,” Tim said, masking his reluctance. “But how the hell are we going to get way out there?”

Suddenly the computer pinged and another message came through. The voice was tinny through the cheap speakers, but the worry in Ethan Hudson's voice was clear as he asked them to check on his father, who had stayed late at his shop and never made it home.

“Poor guy probably plowed into a snowbank,” Sheila said. “Somehow, we've got to get out there. At least they're both in the same direction.”

 

There was silence after the scream, a silence so complete and acute that Kat could almost taste it, like something metallic in the air.

This was it. The opportunity they needed.

And her brothers took it. She heard Scooter cry out as someone grabbed him, then long moments ticked past, punctuated by grunts and shuffling.

Then the generator kicked in.

She realized that what had seemed like forever had in reality been only a matter of seconds, and she cursed the generator they had begged their father to buy, though she had no idea whether the outcome would have been the same without it.

She was still in the closet when the dim light from the hallway showed her Scooter on the floor of her bedroom, Frazier straddling him and Jamie sitting on his feet.

There was a bruise darkening on Frazier's face, but Scooter looked the worse for wear, as well, with a bloody lip. And his gun was on the floor.

Jamie made a dive for the gun, reaching it before Scooter could reclaim it.

“Hold it on him, Jamie….” Frazier cautioned.

Jamie held it. Pale as a ghost, he held it.

Frazier got quickly to his feet. Scooter, wary, stayed where he was, nervously eyeing the gun. “You don't even know how to shoot that thing, boy,” he said.

“Aim and pull the trigger, that's what I'm thinking,” Jamie said.

By then Frazier was next to him. “Give it over, Jamie.”

Jamie passed the gun to his brother without a word.

“Get up,” Frazier ordered, flipping off the safety. “Slowly. I don't want to kill you.”

“No? Why not?” Scooter asked calmly.

Too calmly, Kat thought. Didn't he care if he lived or died? Shouldn't his survival instinct kick in?

“We're going downstairs, slowly, calmly, with you in front of me. And no tricks,” Frazier said.

“Okay,” Scooter said, and started walking toward the door.

Kat was planning to scramble out of the closet, but Frazier shook his head in warning as he passed, so she stayed silent and watched them leave the room before she crept free of her hiding place.

She was immediately grateful for her brother's caution when a second scream sounded, followed by the explosive thunder of a shot.

 

The darkness, sudden and total, took Skyler by surprise. She screamed and leaped to her feet before freezing, terrified that if she moved, she would crash into something. Then she gasped, hearing movement—thudding and scuffling—from upstairs.

Without warning, the lights came back on as the generator kicked in.

Under cover of darkness, while she had been frozen in fear, everyone else had shifted. Paddy had his cane raised, ready to strike viciously. The problem was, he had misjudged people's positions and was about to hit her. She screamed again, at the same time realizing that David had made a leap for Quintin.

But Craig was between them. Defending Quintin from David? Or…

Sweet Lord, had he been about to attack Quintin himself?

There was no time to ponder the question. The sound of her scream had barely faded when the air was split by the deafening report of Quintin's gun. He struck out viciously with his other hand, sending Craig crashing back on the couch as David cried out hoarsely.

Then Quintin raised his gun and leveled it on Skyler, nothing but ice in his eyes.

“Mom, get back to the piano. Old man, back in your chair. The rest of you…sit. If I fire again, it will be directly at you, not into the air. And I don't miss.”

He whirled on Craig. “You are one sorry son of a bitch,” he said. “Maybe,” he mused, “I should just finish you off, because you're worthless.”

David spoke before Quintin could fire. “Good idea. Shoot him. He stopped me from reaching you,” he said in a strange mocking tone.

Quintin was still for a moment. Then he lowered his gun. “All right, Craig,” he said. “Maybe you're of some use after all. But remember, I'm always watching you.”

In a split second, he was at Skyler's side, and she felt the cold, hard nose of his gun pressed to her ribs.

“Scooter, get your sorry ass down here!” Quintin yelled.

“The kid has a gun on me!” Scooter shouted.

“And I have one pressed into his mother's ribs.” A nasty smile twisted his features. “I've killed before, kid. And I haven't got a hell of a lot to lose. Shoot Scooter or try to shoot me, and your mom's dead. Give the gun back to Scooter, then get back down here.”

“No, Frazier!” Skyler cried. “Shoot them both!” Then she cried out in fear as David instinctively moved to protect her.

Quintin moved like lightning. The nose of the gun never shifted from her side as Quintin lashed out and caught David off guard, sending him flying so hard against the wall that she could have sworn she heard the crack of his skull before he slumped to the floor.

“Dad!” Frazier shouted in anguish as he and Jamie pushed Scooter in front of them into the living room.

“He's not dead, kid, but your mother is about to be,” Quintin said.

“No, please,” Frazier begged, and set the gun down on the ground. Scooter immediately turned around and retrieved the weapon, then slugged Frazier in the jaw, hard.

Her son staggered back, and she jerked free from Quintin's hold, heedless of whether he shot her or not. “Don't you touch my son!” she shrieked as she flew at Scooter, who backed off in shock. Then she turned to Quintin, and the look she gave him dared him to stop her as she walked over to her husband. “David?”

He groaned softly.

“I'll get him up,” Craig volunteered, and hurried over to help. Her husband wasn't a small man, and Craig wasn't at full strength, but he managed to lift David and carry him to the sofa, then lay him out where he had been himself not all that long ago.

“Okay, okay, very sweet,” Quintin said. “Now let's everybody get it together here. Stay calm. Collected. Cool. I think we need something hot to drink. Maybe a little Irish coffee will put us all back on an even keel.”

Skyler swallowed, and tried hard not to think about how badly hurt her husband might be. “Fine,” she said and started for the kitchen.

“No, no, no. You're too dangerous. You just proved that against stupid over there,” Quintin said.

“Hey!” Scooter complained.

“You let a couple of kids overpower you,” Quintin told him. “How smart was that?”

Scooter flushed and looked furious—as if he might try to deck one of the kids again, Skyler thought, and noticed that Frazier was still rubbing his jaw.

“We'll all go to the kitchen,” Quintin said.

“What about my husband?” Skyler asked worriedly.

Quintin stared at David, who still hadn't regained consciousness.

“I'll watch him,” Craig said to Quintin. “I saved your ass, and like you keep saying, you've got the gun. What the hell am I going to do out here with a half dea—with an unconscious guy?”

“Fine. The rest of you, let's go,” Quintin said.

The room still smelled like gunpowder from the shot he had fired, Skyler thought as she turned and started for the kitchen. “Come on, kids. And, Jamie, don't even ask. You're getting cocoa. You, too, Uncle Paddy.”