The Samaritan (41 page)
I heard a scream from the direction of the house. It was Allen.
I didn’t waste time looking for my gun, or Allen’s. The Samaritan and his sister would have made sure not to leave them anywhere near us, on the off chance we did manage to get loose. I started for the door and then froze when I heard another, closer sound.
Footsteps.
Quickly, as silently as I could manage, I moved to the side of the barn door, holding my breath though my lungs were fighting for air after the exertion of breaking free. No sooner had I made it into position than the sound of boots stopped just outside the door and I heard breathing. Without knowing where exactly he was standing, I couldn’t be sure if the post where I’d been tied up was in his line of sight. I heard Allen scream again and my blood ran cold. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to move, to keep still, keep holding my breath.
And then Crozier stepped through the doorway. The split second of confusion in his body language told me that for the first time tonight, I’d gotten lucky. He hadn’t been able to see the bare post from outside. Maybe he’d just stopped to look back at the house and savor the sounds of Allen’s pain. I didn’t particularly care. I charged into him from the side, wrapping my arms around his waist and bringing him down hard on the floor. He was still holding the Kris, and he hung on to it even as I slammed him to the ground.
His bright eyes fixed on mine as I landed on top of him. My senses went into crunch-time mode. Everything was in slow motion. I saw his fist tighten around the hilt of the Kris even as his body contacted the ground. All my instincts told me I ought to deal with the knife first. Block it, grab it, get it away from him.
I ignored those instincts. I wanted to cause him pain more than I wanted to avoid it myself. I hit him hard in the face, feeling teeth give way behind the flesh of his lips. It was a solid blow with no time for defense. I hit him so hard that it took most of the energy out of his simultaneous thrust with the blade. He’d been swinging around to stick me in my left side. Instead, his wrist contacted my left arm and the six-inch curved blade finished its travel in thin air, an inch behind my shoulder blades. I hit him again and again. I realized I’d been pulling my punches earlier with McCall. This was something else. I’d never hit a human being this hard before. I didn’t think I’d even hit a bag this hard before. I wanted to pound his face into the dirt until there was nothing left.
But somehow he took it. Before I could hit him a fourth time, he’d gotten his left palm under my throat and was squeezing. I saw the blade glint out of the corner of my eye and realized he was about to bring it back around again. I shifted my weight and got my left forearm up in time to block the strike. The impact of our arms contacting felt like I’d been hit with a bat. I was off balance now, and as he bucked under me, I started to slip off of him and winced as my injured ankle twisted under his body. He managed to scramble to one knee as I fell back. I heard the blade sing through the air as he swung it back around, backhanded. I kicked off the ground to avoid the arc of the blade, not quite getting out of range as the razor-sharp steel parted the cloth of my shirt. I glanced down at my stomach as I fell backward, seeing blood, but not a deep cut. An inch or two closer, and I would have been picking my intestines off the floor.
He got to his feet and lunged at me, firmly on the offensive now. His face was a fright mask of hate. Blood poured from his shattered mouth and his flattened nose. I rolled aside as he brought the blade down and then blocked his arm again on the follow-up. I knew I’d been lucky to parry the two close swipes so far and that I couldn’t expect that lucky streak to continue. Before he could pull back for another cutting swing, I grabbed the hand holding the Kris with both hands and started to twist, trying to wrest it from his grip. He held firm, his eyes burning into me from the bloody wreck of his face. He got his other hand in my face, his fingers clawing for my eyes. I couldn’t let go of the knife hand to protect my face, so I did the best I could, angling my jaw upward and jamming my eyes shut tight. Navigating blind now, I focused all of my energy on the hand holding the knife. Forget about taking it from him. Give it back to him instead.
I switched the tactic from twisting to pushing. Crozier, utterly focused on holding on to the knife with one hand while trying to gouge my eyes out with the other, wasn’t prepared for this. Too late, he gave up on my eyes and brought his left hand back for reinforcement. But by that time, I’d already pushed the point of the blade an inch into his throat. He gagged and tried again to pull the knife back, but I got the heel of my right hand to the bottom of the hilt and drove the blade up, up. I felt hot blood course down my arms as I kept the pressure on.
His throat made a horrible gurgling sound, and his eyes rolled white, and then, only then, did his hands relax. I pushed his body to the ground. As I wiped the blood off my hands, I remembered that there was no time to rest. It might already be too late to save Allen.
The night air was cool on my skin as I tumbled through the door of the barn. I could see lamplight burning in the attic room of the house. The screaming had stopped, but I could hear low voices emanating from the glassless window. A one-sided conversation. Kimberley was taking a break, perhaps selecting a new tool.
Ignoring the sharp lances of pain that dug into my ankle with every other step, I ran for the door and found it open. I was on the second stair when I heard the first gunshot from above.
I froze on the stairs at the sound of the first shot. I gripped the handrail at the sound of the second. Two shots so close together that they almost had to be into a single target.
Allen. I was too late. Kimberley had killed her.
My mind raced to process the new information. It didn’t make sense. They liked to torture their victims, make them suffer. Crozier and his sister had wanted me to listen and be powerless to do anything before it was my turn. Even if Kimberley had decided to put her out of her misery, she wouldn’t have used a gun. I got the feeling the final killing stroke was Kimberley’s job, and I didn’t believe she’d pass that up for any reason.
The next sound told me she hadn’t. I heard a gasp and the sound of faltering footsteps. Kimberley appeared at the top of the stairs, a long, thin knife coated with blood in her hands. I tensed to defend myself, but then I saw there was no need. A trickle of blood ran down from a hole in the center of her forehead, as though someone had turned on a faucet. Her eyes rolled in her head and she crumpled to the floor, her head tilted back over the stairs. Her eyes stared down at me from there, dead. It was then that I noticed there was blood coming from underneath her too, from her abdomen.
I inched up the stairs toward her, keeping my head down but angling myself so I could see into the room. The first thing I saw was Allen. Her shirt had been stripped off. She was hanging from the manacles I’d seen earlier on. Her upper body was bloodied by a number of cuts. It was impossible to tell how many there were because the bleeding was so profuse. She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at something or someone out of my line of sight. I took another couple of steps up so that I could see most of the second floor.
The person who’d executed Kimberley was standing a couple of steps back from the stairs, facing Allen, not looking in my direction. He held the gun that had killed Kimberley in his right hand. He looked very calm, in good shape. Mid-twenties, solid build, around five eleven. He had an almost preppy air about him: short dark hair, thin-frame glasses, jeans, and a black tennis shirt. He looked like a junior doctor on a weekend break in the country.
Allen hadn’t noticed me either. Her eyes were fixed on her apparent savior. I guessed he’d been drawn to the house by her screams.
“Thank you,” Allen said, sounding out of breath. “How did you—?”
The man in the glasses said nothing. Then he raised his gun again and pointed it at Allen’s head.
“Stop,” I said, stepping up the last stairs and fully into the attic room.
The man’s head swiveled back to me. His gun stayed on Allen. His brown eyes blinked behind the lenses, dispassionately assessing the change to the dynamic of the situation.
“Carter Blake, isn’t it?” he said.
“Do I know you?”
“No. You were before my time.”
I looked down at Kimberley’s body and the position of the bullet holes. One dead center at the breastbone, one between the eyes to finish the job. Professional.
“Winterlong,” I said.
“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“How’s Drakakis?”
He blinked again. “Not here anymore. Where’s Crozier?”
“Dead. In the barn.” I gestured toward Allen. “We’re just leaving.”
He kept his gun on her, shook his head briefly. “This is a deep clean. No witnesses.”
I glanced at Allen. She glanced at me and then back to the man with the gun. “Who the hell is this guy, Blake?”
I didn’t answer and took a step toward the man in glasses. He didn’t react, so I took another and another until we were five feet apart.
“Don’t come any closer.”
“If you pull that trigger, you die next,” I said, flexing my bloodied hands.
His eyes dropped to my hands and back up my blood-soaked upper body, all the way to my face. “I don’t see a gun.”
“I won’t need one.”
“
I’m
the one with the gun.”
“You’ve heard about me,” I said. “You know you can’t kill me.”
“Maybe things have changed.”
“Maybe.”
We stood there for a minute, watching each other. I decided to help him make the decision. “The cops are coming. You don’t have time for this. She doesn’t know anything, anyway.”
He took his time, kept the gun on Allen and his eyes on me. And then he raised the gun and clicked the safety back on. He walked back toward the stairs, eyes on me the whole time. I half expected some kind of parting shot, like “This isn’t over” or “Be seeing you,” but none was forthcoming. The brown eyes behind the glasses adhered to me until he reached the stairs, and then he was gone.
I walked across the room, glancing back at Kimberley’s body. The blood coming from the exit wound underneath her was pooling and seeping into the floorboards, adding a fresh coat to the other patches of dried gore. I took my jacket off and hung it on Allen’s shoulders. She kept her eyes shut tight, flinching when my hands touched her.
“It’s over now,” I said quietly.
Once I’d cut Allen down, I examined her wounds. She needed medical attention—there was no doubt about that—but she’d live. The cuts were superficial, calculated to inflict pain and blood loss rather than mortal injury. The Samaritan and his sister had liked to take their time. I found my gun and Allen’s on the table beside the rest of the knives and tools, along with a cell phone that I guessed was Crozier’s.
I took a second to open the photo album and immediately regretted it. Hundreds of pictures of the Samaritan’s victims. Males, females, all ages, multiple races. Alive, dead, wishing they were dead. I was no stranger to death, but this went beyond even my experience. Steeling myself, I leafed to the back and found the most recent pictures. Boden, Burnett, and Morrow. Kimberley was in some of these ones, taking part in the torture with a zealous glint in her eyes. I remembered the urgency in her voice the first time I’d gone near the book and realized why she’d stopped me.
“What is it?” Allen called.
I swallowed and closed the cover of the album, knowing that some of those images were burned into me for good. I walked back over to Allen and helped her toward the stairs. We stepped across Kimberley’s body and descended to the ground level, emerging into the fresh night air.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Allen was shivering, but she nodded. “Where’s Mazzucco?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t blink, just asked, “Where?”
I pointed in the direction of the barn. Part of me thought I should tell her to stay put, that she was in no condition for this, but the look on her face gave me second thoughts.
I followed her across to the barn, a few paces behind, and let her go in by herself. A couple of minutes later, she appeared at the doorway again. My jacket was no longer around her shoulders, and I knew she’d draped it over Mazzucco’s face.
She didn’t look at me at first, just took a deep breath and looked back at the make-believe house with its single lit window.
“You mind explaining to me what the hell just happened, Blake?”
“We got it wrong. Kimberley wasn’t the target. He was killing those women as a tribute to her. She was helping him. I think she probably helped him kill his family, too.”
“So she was the reason he came back to LA, just not in the way we thought.”
“There’s always something you don’t know,” I said.
“What about the guy with the gun? Was he from . . . before?”
I nodded. “They don’t like people drawing attention to them. If Crozier had been caught alive . . .”
“Unwanted attention. I get it. What about his prints?”
“That ship’s sailed, remember? They already ran the ones from the house. This is damage limitation.”
She nodded. “Thank you, by the way.”
I didn’t say anything. All things considered, I didn’t think Allen should be thanking me for anything.
She leaned back against the barn and closed her eyes. She held her hand out. “Give me the phone.” I handed it to her. She turned away from me and made the call. When she was done, she turned back to me. “They’ll be here soon. You should go.”
I looked her up and down. She looked reasonably okay. She was one tough customer. But still . . .
Seeing my hesitation, she raised her voice and yelled, “Go! If you’re here when they get here, I can’t protect you.”