Chris Mooney - The Killing House

Mr De Luca had stopped his death dance. She dragged him over to the remaining oven. Christ, he was heavy. Thank God she had to drag him only a few feet.

Marie loaded him face first into the oven bay, gripping the back of his belt to keep him from falling out. Then she picked him up by the legs and pushed him inside. She was covered in sweat by the time she’d finished.

And she was covered in blood. It was on her hands and forearms, smeared on her apron and nice shoes and splattered across the floor and along the cremation unit itself. She gathered her supplies, cleaned up and threw the bloody rags inside the oven. Then she stripped out of her apron and clothes, threw them inside, fired up the ovens and walked upstairs wearing nothing but her birthday suit.

Showered and dressed in clean clothes, she headed back to the cremation unit. She smashed the bones and brushed out the ashes, collecting everything inside an ordinary plastic rubbish bag. The empty. 38 gun cartridge went into her trouser pocket.

Driving away in the Lincoln, Marie carefully paid attention to her side and rearview mirrors, searching to see if anyone was following her. She could feel the brass cartridge digging against her hip.

She had left behind two empty gun cartridges in Colorado. Normally, she would have picked them up, but there hadn’t been time — and she assumed the blast would have scattered them to Kingdom Come. She wasn’t worried about fingerprints; she had worn gloves as she loaded the bullets. Still, police crime labs could do all sorts of new and tricky things with evidence.

But the police weren’t involved — at least not yet. A cop wouldn’t have snuck into her house, tied up and then tortured Mr Corrigan. Someone else had done that. Someone had tortured Gary Corrigan for information before escaping with Nathan Santiago.

There were only two plausible scenarios. Either the man she’d shot in Colorado had, through some miracle of God, survived and was hot on her tail, hell-bent on revenge; or maybe the man he worked for, Ali Karim, had done the deed himself. If the mysterious Colorado man was alive, maybe he was working together with his boss on some secret agenda to find and kill her.

Then why didn’t he wait for me at the house? Why take Nathan Santiago and run? And how had he — they — found her house?

She had no idea, not even a working theory. The lack of answers made her feel cold all over.

Maybe Brandon was right. Maybe it was time to get out of Dodge while they still had time.

Then her thoughts turned to James Weeks and any idea of leaving vanished.

Jimmy Weeks was thinking about water. When he wasn’t thinking about it, he was dreaming about it. The only thing he cared about right now was something cold to drink. Yes, it was crazy — bat-shit crazy, given his circumstances — but, for whatever reason, his mind had fixed on it, despite the terror of being locked away in the dark.

Every once in a while he’d hear the big, steel door outside his cage swing open. A moment of darkness would follow and then he’d hear the click of a light switch and the bare bulb would expose the small room, with its concrete walls and floor. Erected on either side of him were two more cages, both empty.

The woman who had pretended to be an FBI agent smiled every time she came to bring him food. The first time she visited, she gave him a plastic Wal-Mart bag holding someone else’s clothing: a pair of tight-fitting black sweatpants, wool socks and a big crimson sweatshirt that had the Harvard emblem printed on the front and a tear along the collar.

The food was either hard dinner rolls or Wonder Bread smeared with peanut butter, a bottle of Gatorade or water. He had tried to speak to her, asking her questions, but she simply ignored him. She gave him his food, left and shut the door. There had been no showers, and he hadn’t brushed his teeth.

She hadn’t hurt him or threatened him in any way — which made sense, because this was nothing more than a cut-and-dry kidnapping. Jimmy had seen enough movies and TV shows to know the procedure: the woman would keep him locked up in here until the time came to bring him to the drop-off point, where he would be traded for some gym bag stuffed full of cash. Do what he was told and everything would be fine.

That inner voice kept disagreeing with him, and it spoke up again now: You’re wrong, Jimmy.

No, he replied. No, I’m not.

Let’s review some key facts, then. Let’s start with -

No, I don’t want to -

Fact number one: every time she comes in here, she’s not wearing a mask. Why would she let you see her face? If she lets you go, she knows the police are going to question you. She knows you’ve seen her all up close and personal. You can describe her from head to toe. You think she doesn’t know that?

Shut up, please, just shut -

And here’s fact number two: you’re not alone. You know what I’m talking about.

Jimmy forced himself not to think about it, but his mind had this really shitty way of making him see things that he didn’t want to see. Every time the heavy door opened, he’d heard someone moaning, the sound near and yet far away at the same time — from a room close by, he thought.

Not just one voice, Jimmy. Several. You’re not the only person here.

He hugged his knees to his chest, swallowing.

I know that scares the living shit out of you, but you know as well as I do this isn’t a kidnapping. A kidnapper wouldn’t lock you naked inside a goddamn dog crate — and then there’s the matter of that wound on your back. I don’t know what that’s about, and I’m not going to bullshit you and say I have the first clue as to what’s going on here, but there’s one thing I do know, and you need to hear it. And I’m going to keep repeating it until it sinks into your head.

He jumped at the sound of the deadbolt sliding back.

You’re going to have to find a way to kill this woman.

A key was moving inside the lock.

You need to escape from this place, Jimmy. If you don’t, you’re going to die a horrible death down here.

Fletcher reached Midtown Manhattan a few minutes shy of 7 a.m., dry-eyed and weary. A cold and milky predawn light had broken across the streets and buildings of Fifth Avenue, the setting of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence. The horse-drawn carriages that had once dominated this area over a century ago had been replaced by hustling delivery vans, taxis and limousines. Joggers, dog-walkers, and early risers off to work paced the streets, while doormen in garish uniforms poised like sentries guarded gold-plated gateways leading to luxury kingdoms owned by the new century’s robber barons.

Karim lived and conducted his day-to-day business operations from inside a historic five-floor neo-Italian Renaissance mansion commissioned in 1922 by a wealthy German merchant and designed by one of the city’s most prominent architects at the time, C. P. H. Gilbert. Karim did not employ a doorman, driver, maid or chef. With the exception of Boyd Paulson — and now, the mercurial Emma White — Fletcher did not know the names of the employees who worked out of the man’s home. Every time Fletcher visited, Karim sent his people to the company’s main office in Downtown Manhattan.

Snaking his way towards his destination, Fletcher saw a businessman step over a vagrant passed out in the middle of the pavement. A patrolman directing street traffic turned his back on a young woman repeatedly slapping her child. Seeing the common ugliness on display beyond the Jaguar’s tinted glass made him long for a hot shower, followed by an even longer, uninterrupted sleep.

He turned left and drove up the short ramp leading to Karim’s private garage. The metal gate was closed. A pair of security cameras watched him.