Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

She wrapped her hand around the wet, bloodied grip and pointed it at Lewis’s head. He had rolled onto his back, had raised himself half up with his arms, and was scrambling backward, crablike, dragging the wounded leg after him.

Nicole was on her knees now, both hands on the gun, her arms out straight and steady. “I hate guns,” she said. Her blouse was torn open, revealing something else, dark and padded.

A vest.

“Nicole,” Lewis said. “Listen, listen to-”

She pulled the trigger and blew a corner of his head off. His body went flat, the floor a mass of blood and skull and brain matter.

Howard threw his hand to his mouth, like he was going to vomit. He turned, flung back the curtain, and started to run. Nicole scrambled after him.

In the distance, I heard sirens.

I pulled my left hand free of the tape, which now hung loose from my right hand and started tearing into the tape around my stomach that held me to the chair.

The sirens grew louder.

But even closer, the sounds of a car screeching to a stop in the alley. Someone shouting. A woman.

“Thomas!”

Shit.

I broke free of the chair and dived to the floor, scattering toys before me. I wanted to get over to Lewis, to his body.

There was a gun, tucked into the front of his pants. Morris’s gun, maybe.

In the front room, I heard a pfft, pfft and then the sound of another body dropping.

From outside: “Ray!”

“Thomas, stop!”

Julie.

I was on my knees, reaching for the gun, my fingers just touching the grip, when the curtain flung back. I glanced up, just in time to see Nicole’s boot catch my jaw.

It was one hell of a kick.

I saw stars as my body was catapulted backward. My arms went out instinctively to brace my fall, but it still hurt like hell when I landed. Something sharp dug into my back, then skittered out from under me. A toy dump truck.

My right hand had landed on one of the other items that had tumbled off the shelves. Even before I looked at it I could feel that it was part plastic, part metal.

Nicole pointed her gun at me. But before she could squeeze the trigger, there was a loud bang from the short hallway that led to the alley.

A door being thrown open.

“I got help!” Thomas screamed. “I got Julie!”

“No!” Julie, sounding as though she was a step behind him, screamed.

Nicole’s eyes turned toward the voices, and the gun followed. The second Thomas appeared he’d be dead.

I glanced over at my right hand, which was draped across the blue plastic fins of a foot-long, metal-pointed lawn dart.

It wasn’t exactly a javelin. But I wasn’t just good at throwing one of those in high school. I was pretty damn good at regular old darts.

In the milliseconds I had before Thomas ran in, I hoped throwing darts was like riding a bike. You never forget how.

Despite the throbbing in the side of my head, the pain in my jaw and my back, I moved with lightning speed, grabbing the dart by the tail end, swinging it back over my shoulder, then pitching it forward with everything I had.

“Ray!”

Thomas burst into the room.

The dart went into Nicole’s neck. It went in far enough, an inch or two, that it hung there.

Her mouth opened but no scream came out. Her right hand held on to the gun as her left flew up. She grasped the dart, and yanked it out.

It was like water from a tap.

Blood spurting everywhere.

Nicole dropped the dart and clamped her left hand over the wound. She dropped the gun from her right, turned, stumbled over to the desk.

She coughed and blood spilled from her mouth as well as her throat. She used the desk to briefly support herself, but only for a few seconds. She dropped to the floor as the sirens became almost deafening.

Now Julie was in the room, and she hit the brakes as soon as she saw the carnage. A firefighter, running in behind her, nearly knocked her over when she stopped so abruptly.

“Ray?” she said.

Thomas was already helping me to my feet. “Look who I found,” he said. “I brought Julie.” He smiled. “I’m back.”

Over the next twenty-four hours, Thomas and I, and Julie, had to answer a lot of questions from a lot of different agencies. We were questioned separately, and together, by New York City cops, state police, FBI, even the Port Authority, for all I knew. One guy, I was told later, was from Homeland Security, but there were so many who wanted to pick our brains that I couldn’t figure out which one he was.

Thomas, when we had a moment together, expressed some concern that there was no one from the CIA. “You’d think they’d be here, wanting to see how I’m doing,” he whispered. I could see the disappointment in his eyes. He was hurt.

The benefit of all these hours of interrogation was that they had a way of informing us about what had happened. The blanks started to get filled in, in large part because the fire department and paramedics had arrived in time to save Howard Talliman and Morris Sawchuck, both found bleeding on the floor of the toy shop.

Talliman, whose condition was critical, had not been all that forthcoming so far, but Sawchuck, who’d been shot in the lung and was listed in serious condition, was telling prosecutors everything he knew. Because he was hooked up to various machines to assist with his breathing, he was answering questions as quickly as he could type them on the laptop they’d brought into the ICU.

A lot of what had happened became clear during our kidnapping. Fitch’s blackmail attempt-what she knew or claimed to have known was still not entirely clear to us-led to a decision to kill her. Bridget Sawchuck was killed by mistake. Nicole killed that couple in Chicago as part of her mission to get the image of the smothered woman off the Internet.

That was kind of it, in a nutshell.

Lewis Blocker, of course, was dead.

And the paramedics were not able to save Nicole. Turned out that wasn’t her real name. There was talk that in another life she was some kind of Olympic athlete-that explained the power in that kick-but the cops were still trying to piece a lot of things together.

I didn’t feel good about killing the woman. I knew I’d had no choice, but I took no pleasure in it. I was going to be having nightmares about this for a very long time.

Bottom line was, I’d rather it was her being put in the ground than me. Or Thomas.

Many of the questions that were put to me, when I was being questioned alone, were about Thomas, and his bizarre preoccupation. I know they were in touch with Dr. Grigorin, and our good friends Agents Parker and Driscoll of the FBI made an appearance. They confirmed much of what I’d been saying: that while Thomas was certainly unique, he was not a threat to anyone or himself. By the end, it appeared the various law enforcement agencies were not only persuaded that Thomas was harmless, but that he was a hero. Bridget Sawchuck’s murder would never have come to light without his explorations on Whirl360.

What was left unspoken was that it was these same explorations that led, ultimately, to the deaths of Kyle and Rochelle Billings. Whether this crossed Thomas’s mind I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t point it out to him. Maybe because their deaths were as much my fault as his. I was the idiot who’d waved that printout around when I’d knocked on Allison Fitch’s apartment door, which, evidently, had been picked up on a surveillance camera.

The one thing that never came up was the call Lewis took in Thomas’s bedroom. Thomas told me he’d never mentioned it, and neither had I.

THOMAS was more withdrawn than usual in the wake of everything that had happened. What we’d been through would be traumatic for anyone. Yet I wondered whether Thomas’s idiosyncrasies actually made him better prepared to cope. He generally shut the world out, except those parts he could access online. With that kind of wall around him, maybe he’d taken in less of the horror.