Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

Howard said, “I’ve been where you are now, Morris. When this all started, when I gave Lewis the okay to take drastic action where Allison Fitch was concerned, I couldn’t believe I was doing it. I’d never taken that kind of step before. Never, believe me. All the things I may have done for you in the past, they’ve never included murder. And then…then it went horribly wrong, and I felt even sicker. But you know what? You reach a point where you realize there’s no going back. You’ve made your decisions and you have to live with them. That’s what you’re going to have to do, Morris. You’re going to have to make a decision and live with it.”

Morris placed an arm against the door, leaned his head into it. “I need a minute.”

“Of course you do.”

“Tell me about that woman,” he said to Lewis, who had taken the barrel away from his temple. “The one you killed.”

“A killer for hire,” Lewis said. “She had it coming. She’s done a lot of bad things, and the worst of all was screwing up, killing Bridget. You have to know, I was never going to let her get away with that.”

Morris felt as though he might collapse. He threw a hand onto Howard’s shoulder for support. The three men stood there that way for a while, Lewis and Howard apparently willing to wait for Morris to come around.

What choice did he have, really?

“I don’t want you to hurt Heather,” he said.

“I can’t believe you haven’t been putting it to her,” Lewis said, trying to break the mood.

“She has two kids,” Morris said. “Two little girls.”

“Yeah, well.”

Howard said some consoling words to Morris, made some of the arguments he’d already made all over again.

Finally, Lewis glanced back toward the curtain and said, “I’ll go check on them.”

Howard said, “This Vachon business, I want to know more about that. Do what you have to do to find out if Ray’s feeding us a line of shit.”

“Vachon?” Morris said.

“Long story,” Howard said. Then, to Lewis, “Once we’re sure we have nothing to worry about there, then, well, I want them dealt with as mercifully as we can.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry.”

Lewis headed for the back room.

“Howard,” Morris said, “for the love of God, you can’t just-”

“Shit!” It was Lewis. He’d pulled back the curtain, then called to Howard, “We got a problem.”

Nicole is doing her dismounts from the uneven bars. A double salto backward tucked with full twist. A double salto backward piked. An underswing with a half turn to salto backward, tucked with a full turn.

She can’t get them right.

She keeps landing on her head.

Time after time. Her head plunges like a missile. Pounds into the mat. She feels her will snap. The pain’s tremendous. Her skull throbs.

It gets worse. An ice pick is sticking up through the mat. After her head hits the mat, her body topples over and the pick plunges into her chest.

It keeps happening over and over again. Letting go of the bar, spinning through the air, twisting and turning, but nothing is going as it should. She tells her body to spin one way and it does the opposite.

This is not happening, she tells herself. This cannot be happening.

Nicole was right. It was not happening. Although it was true that her head was injured, that she had taken a blow to the chest.

Realization was slowly returning to her. Before she had opened her eyes, things began to make sense.

Lewis had shot her.

Yeah.

Just like that. Wanting to make an impression on Morris. She’d figured it was coming, that Lewis would try this sooner or later. She just hadn’t expected it at that moment.

But she’d also known that could happen. That you could be on your guard, and still slip up.

The bullet hit her, hit her hard. Lying there, before she opened her eyes, she wondered whether it had pierced the Kevlar, made it all the way through the formfitting vest, but she did not think so. It felt more like she had been kicked than shot.

It wasn’t the bullet that knocked her out. It was being thrown back, hitting her head on the edge of that goddamn shelf. She was seeing stars before she hit the floor.

But now she was waking up. And she was listening.

Probably best to just stay put for a while.

Linwood Barclay

Trust Your Eyes

“Where is he?” Lewis barked at me. “Where the hell is he?”

“Gone,” I said.

Howard showed up, fixed his eyes on the empty chair littered with duct tape scraps. What little color there was in his face seemed to drain away instantly. “Dear God.” Then he glared at Lewis. “You let him get away.”

Lewis tore out of the room using the side door, no doubt hoping Thomas had only just left, that he could catch up with him and drag him back. Thomas had only been gone a few seconds, half a minute tops, but if he was running flat out, it would give him enough time to get a healthy head start.

I just hoped that, having gotten away, Thomas would have the sense to go to the police, even if that wasn’t exactly what I’d asked. I’d only told him to get help. I’d assumed he’d know what that meant, but he was no sooner out the door than I wished I’d been more specific.

At the moment, he was my only hope.

“How did-how the hell did he get free?” Howard asked.

“I told you he was talented,” I said, perhaps with just a touch of smugness. “Maybe he’s gone for Vachon. Maybe his people were out there waiting for him. I wonder what they’ll do when he tells them what you-”

Howard snapped. He swung his arm back and hit me across the face with the back of his hand. He put more into it than I would have thought possible for the short little fucker.

“Enough bullshit!” he said.

My cheek burned, my brains rattled.

The curtain opened and it was Morris. “What the hell’s happened now?”

“One of them got away,” Howard said. “The one with the atlas in his head.”

“Atlas?” Morris had a long way to go to get up to speed.

“Lewis has gone looking for him. God help us, he better find him.”

“You can’t keep this up,” Morris said. “You can’t. It’s unraveling. You’re unraveling. You have been for months.” He took out his phone and held it up. “You took my gun but you didn’t take this. I told Heather to take the rest of the night off. In fact, I told her to take the next couple days off. To get out of town. I didn’t want to take any chances. She’s gone. I think that was the last straw for me, Howard. Threatening Heather. A total innocent. You’re a man with no lines left to cross.”

Howard looked at him, no doubt assessing the implications.

“What else did you tell her?”

“I told her you were going to give me a lift home. You and Lewis.”

“So if anything happens to you, she’ll know.”

Morris nodded. His voice was strangely calm. “Let this man go. And you and Lewis would be smart to turn yourselves in. Either that, or you better be on a jet to Bolivia by noon with a couple of new identities. You know the best lawyers in the city, Howard. Pick one out for yourself and one for Lewis. Then the clock’ll start ticking, see who can cut the best deal by ratting out the other. No one knows better than us how the game is played. I guess that’s basically what I’m going to do, too. Howard, let this man go.”

I was already working on it. I’d been straining at the tape around my wrists since the moment Thomas had left. I’d been picking at the edges with my fingernails, trying to create even a tiny bit of slack.

Howard said, “I wish it were that simple, Morris.”