Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

SUSAN SWUNG THE pistol, tried to pick out the shape of the balaclava she had glimpsed in the dark, but before her was a tangle of shapes as Malone and the intruder wrestled. They crashed into the dining-room table, crushing a book-shelf, spilling books and ornaments. Someone got free—she heard the crunch of bones and a gasp of pain, and her heart sank as a silhouette appeared in the doorway, not Malone but a bigger, stronger man who glanced back as he headed down the hall.

“Stop!” Susan pointed the gun, but he was already gone. “Stop right now!”

He was in the kitchen. Susan ran and pushed the swinging door open, and almost immediately it swung back and hit her awkwardly, the shock enough to jolt the gun from her hands. His hands were on her wrists as he dragged her into the dark, and she twisted, planted a foot in his gut, and wrenched herself free. The knife block tumbled under her hands, spilling blades, but there was no time to get them. She grabbed a pot on the stove, turned, swung, and landed a solid blow to the side of a face. She heard what sounded like a tooth rattling as it hit the floor.

He was outnumbered and outmaneuvered and he knew it. Before Malone was fully through the door, Susan saw the shape of the intruder skirting past him. Susan and Malone rushed to the doorway in time to see the man run up the stairs, a desperate move, the intruder trying to hide in the house in the dark. He reached the second floor, and Susan’s eyes were flooded with visions of who lay there sleeping and what he could do to them—stab them in their beds, bash their heads in, take them hostage. For a split second she could see all the atrocities she had witnessed over the course of her career, the howling mouths of the dead frozen, protesting their last violent seconds, in beds, in doorways, hanging over banisters, trying to claw their way out to escape.

Susan didn’t make it to the second step. As the man reached the top of the staircase, Neddy Ives’s door slammed open with tremendous force and smacked the intruder with as much power and desperation as he was using to get away. The collision seemed to shake the house.

Susan and Malone parted as the unconscious man tumbled down the stairs between them, a rag doll who came to a twisted stop at their feet.

Neddy Ives surveyed his work for a moment, gripping the door, his eyes hollow in the dim moonlight spilling in the second-floor window.

“Would you mind keeping it down?” he said quietly. “It’s late.”

Malone and Susan watched as he went back inside his room and closed his door.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

I SAW THE flashing red ambulance lights from a long way off, and I slammed my foot down on the accelerator even before I could tell they were at the Inn. Having dozed off almost as soon as we left Gloucester’s harbor, Effie jerked awake in her seat, like a robot suddenly switched to standby mode.

Almost all of the crew was on the porch in the eerie blue predawn, coats or blankets pulled around their shoulders, watching as two men were loaded into ambulances. Doc Simeon was briefing two paramedics, his hands covered to the wrists in blood. I leaped out of the car and silently counted my people like a parent counting kids, my heart hammering in my chest.

On the stretcher, a man I recognized from Cline’s house was sucking oxygen and howling with pain, one knee swathed in thick bandages already soaked through with blood. Another man was cuffed and sitting up on a stretcher, looking mildly dazed as he was wheeled toward the vehicle. Blood dripped from his nose and mouth.

“You didn’t tell me it was this serious,” Malone said as I got to the porch. “Vinny stopped the first guy but the other one got inside.”

“Vinny didn’t just stop the guy,” Doc Simeon said, walking past us toward the house. “That man will never walk properly again. His kneecap was shattered. Felt like eggshells in there.”

Everyone looked at Vinny, who had a blanket with a large hole on it on his knees. His old hands were clasped on the fabric and his eyes were on the trees; he looked like a man watching a football game, half listening to us.

“I don’t know what everybody’s complaining about.” He shrugged. “Guy’s got another one.”

Susan explained what had happened as the ambulances rolled on into the night. Angelica was leaning against a porch column, one hand on the back of Vinny’s wheelchair.

“Maybe Doc doesn’t approve of Vinny’s violent approach,” Angelica said. “But I think it was warranted. We’ve shown them that they can’t come at us with force. They’ve shot at us. We’ve, uh … done some things to them too. Now I think the only course of action is to invite this Mr. Cline over here to discuss the issue of his leaving town. We could put together a nice lunch.”

Vinny started laughing, a gravelly, hacking sound.

“What?” Angelica stroked the sling on her arm consolingly. “People of your ilk have them all the time in the movies. Sit-downs , you call them. With the, uh … the consiglieri ?”

“All that time you spend making shit up in books has given you a real interesting perspective on life, Ange.” Vinny nodded appreciatively.

“This whole event is like an allegory.” Angelica looked around, her voice wistful. “The gunmen in the night. The porch here is like a theater stage, the silent trees beyond an army of judgmental yet silent souls.”

“Dear God.” I massaged my brow.

“Hey, innkeeper,” Vinny said as I turned to go inside. “You want a real laugh, go talk to the sheriff. He’s in the kitchen.”

Susan followed me through the dining room and across a scattering of broken glass and splintered wood it seemed we had cleared away only a day earlier. I stopped in the hall and put my hands on her shoulders.

“I’m so lucky that you were here,” I said. A stirring deep in my chest had begun, terror at the reality of the situation, the danger my guests had been in, the awful possibilities. “I might have come back and found them all dead in their beds.”

“The people here can take care of themselves,” she said. “It was actually Mr. Ives who dealt the finishing blow.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. The man with no past who dwelled in the room next to Marni’s was emerging, and I had to admit I was feeling a shift in my perception of him. He’d always made me uneasy, like a monster that lives under the stairs, a shadow I crept past like a child. But I was starting to appreciate the guy who lingered in the dark, who could take out a fleeing suspect with a rickety old door and go back to sleep like nothing had happened.

Clay was in his usual position, leaning into the refrigerator, loading a plate in one hand with sandwich fixings. I saw in the gold light that at the back of his head, a patch the size of a playing card had been shaved and a mean-looking gash stitched closed. When he turned to us, I could see the beginning of two black eyes. He limped to the table and sat down, eased a heavy ice pack onto his crotch.

“Look at this, would you?” He sighed, gestured to his face. “I have to have a meeting with the school-district woman this morning. I’m gonna look like a panda.”

“Christ.” I sat down, put my head in my hands as he made his sandwich. “What happened?”

Clay explained about the abduction, the fight in the woods, half his story muffled by bites of an enormous sandwich and slurps of Miller Lite. Despite everything, a smile played on Susan’s lips as she listened.

“So let me get this straight,” she said. “Two days ago, a housewife nails you in the face with an encyclopedia, and tonight you fight off two guys with your hands cuffed behind your back?”

“It was a dictionary.” Clay held the cool beer bottle to his forehead. “And I wasn’t ready for her. These guys at least gave me a second to get my bearings.”