Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

Lewis reappeared, winded. “No sign of him,” he said.

“Morris says we should get lawyers,” Howard said.

“What?”

“He’s not going to play.”

Lewis sneered. “Morris, I thought we had an understanding. What about-”

“Heather’s gone,” he said. “And I’m leaving, too. Don’t worry. I’ll get a cab.”

Morris swept the curtain aside and headed for the front door. Lewis, gun in hand, followed him. “Morris,” he called out.

I heard the same swift sound I’d heard when Lewis shot Nicole. Then a body hitting the floor.

Howard didn’t even look. Didn’t pull back the curtain. He knew what had to have happened. When Lewis reappeared, he walked straight past Howard and came up on my right side.

“Where would your brother go?” he asked me. “Has he got the sense to go to the cops or will he just run and hide somewhere?”

I had to admit the latter was a possibility. “I don’t know,” I said. “If I were you, I’d assume the worst.”

Lewis evidently felt a need to let off some steam just as Howard had, so he hit me, too. Not a slap across the face, but a gun to the side of head. A pistol whip. My right ear exploded in pain, and my left nearly touched my shoulder. I shouted out and watched the room spin around for several seconds.

It was during that period of disorientation I thought I saw Nicole’s arm move, bump ever so slightly into a Dinky Toy tow truck that had fallen from the shelf and landed on its wheels, making it roll forward a quarter of an inch. But then, pretty much everything had seemed to be moving in the seconds after that blow to the head, so I figured I’d imagined it.

“We have to assume we don’t have much time,” Lewis said.

“Great,” Howard said. “Just great. The police may be coming and now we’ve got three bodies to get rid of.”

I wasn’t dead yet, but I figured that time was coming. I continued twisting my wrists back and forth.

“There’s no time for that,” Lewis said. “We just have to get out of here.”

“Where the hell are we going to go?” Howard asked.

“I know people,” Lewis said. “I know people who can hide us until we get the paperwork we need.”

“God, you fucked this whole thing up from the very beginning,” Howard said. “From the moment you decided to kill Fitch, to hiring her”-he pointed to Nicole-“to letting that freak get away.”

“I can go alone,” Lewis said, walking around me, standing between Nicole’s body and me. “If that’s what you’d prefer.”

“Christ,” Howard said, shaking his head in defeat. “Let’s finish this and get the hell out of here.”

I kept twisting and twisting, thinking, if I could manage to get my wrists free, I could propel myself, with the chair attached, at Lewis, somehow grab him by the throat. Anything. Because the gun was in his hand, and I knew his intention was to use it on me in the next few seconds.

But I just wasn’t there yet.

“Okay,” Lewis said, bending his elbow so that the gun was pointing at my head.

And then he screamed. A horrific, gut-wrenching scream.

When he cast his eyes down at the source of his pain, I did as well.

There was an ice pick right through his calf.

“Where’s Ray?” Julie asked Thomas. “Think, okay? Think.”

They were sitting in her car, the engine running, out front of her sister’s cupcake shop. Candace stood on the sidewalk, watching the two of them, obviously wondering what the hell was going on.

“It was dark, and I was running,” Thomas said. His body was trembling, and his clothes were soaked with sweat. “I was running so fast I wasn’t paying attention, not until I got to St. Marks and First Avenue.” He looked at Julie. “It was just like on Whirl360, but you could touch things and smell them.”

“Focus,” Julie said. “You say you ran out into the alley and out to the sidewalk. Which way did you go then?”

“Right.”

“So you didn’t run across the front of the shop where you were being held?”

“No, the other way.”

“What were the first things you passed?”

Thomas thought. “There was a tailor’s, and a bike shop, and…”

“What?”

“I think it was called Mike’s Bikes,” he said.

“Okay.” Julie grabbed her phone from the top of the dashboard. “I’ll see if I can find it.”

“Wait,” Thomas said. Now he had his eyes closed. “Mike’s Bikes. It’s next to the tailor shop.” He jerked his head slightly to one side, paused, jerked again, paused.

“What are you doing?” Julie asked.

“I’m working my way up the street,” Thomas said. He was clicking his mouse, in his head. Advancing through the Whirl360 images.

“What street?”

“East Fourth,” he said. “It’s on East Fourth.”

Julie already had the car in drive and, without even a wave good-bye to her sister, slammed on the accelerator and tore up the street, pitching Thomas’s head back against the headrest. He opened his eyes.

“I can tell you how to get to Fourth,” he said.

“I can figure out that part. Just tell me where on Fourth.”

Thomas closed his eyes again. His head kept jerking. “I’m at an antiques store,” he said. “Ferber’s Antiques. It looks like it has toys in the window.”

“What’s the address?”

He gave her a number. “I think that’s the place. That’s where Ray is.”

Julie ran a light, turned at a cross street, floored it.

“Do you have a gun?” Thomas asked, eyes open again.

“What?”

“Do you have a gun? The man had a gun, and the woman had an ice pick.”

“I don’t have a fucking gun,” she said. Julie knew she couldn’t go storming into this place on her own.

She needed the NYPD and the FDNY. What she didn’t have was time to explain. Julie pointed to the cell phone. “Hit 911, then give it to me.”

Thomas picked up the phone. “Do you hit the talk button first and then the number?”

She grabbed it from his hand, glanced from the phone to the windshield and back again a couple of times, then put the phone to her ear.

When the 911 operator came on, Julie adopted a panicked tone and said, “There’s a fire! It looks like it’s started in the back of Ferber’s! The antiques store on East Fourth! And I think I heard shots, too!” She provided a street number, then ended the call before the operator could ask her anything else, and tossed the phone into Thomas’s lap.

Worked when she was back in school and didn’t want to take her exams.

The ice pick had entered the side of Lewis’s right leg about five inches below the knee. Nicole had driven it straight in, through his jeans, and the tip had come out the other side, poking through his pants, the tip crimson.

It had the effect of pulling that leg out from under him, because he dropped right there, to both knees, crushing one of the board game boxes, screaming the whole time. He let go of his gun and twisted around so he could get hold of the handle of the ice pick to pull it back out.

That wasn’t something I wanted to see, but I was transfixed, as was Howard. What we both ended up seeing was even worse. Nicole sat up and got her hand on the pick before Lewis could, and instead of pulling it out and using it on him again in a new spot, or shoving it in even farther, she yanked on it sideways. The steel within his leg made new paths through his flesh, causing him to cry out again. He jerked his leg furiously, the heel of his boot catching Nicole, who was up on one arm and on her side, square in the chest.

It knocked her onto her back, but she was up in a second.

Lewis was scrambling, looking for his gun. It was on the floor in a rapidly growing puddle of his blood. He went to grab it, but Nicole had her hands on it first.