David Baldacci: Deliver Us From Evil

But it didn’t happen. He understood a second later why.

Rice screamed louder than Shaw had ever heard anyone do before. It was like he had ripped his lungs from his chest and inflated them with a ton of oxygen, producing a sound that froze Shaw to his core. He looked back and wished he hadn’t. Shaw had seen a lot of violence in his life, more than most people. But he had never seen anything like this.

One dog had Rice’s arm in its mouth. The other had just torn through most of the doomed man’s chest as freed blood sprayed everywhere. Shaw had a fleeting image of the Goya painting he’d seen of the monster eating the man. Nothing as feeble as oils and canvas, even powered by the imagination of a genius, could match the horror of the real spectacle. It was only at this point, his body perhaps more gone than not, that Alan Rice finally died.

Shaw reached the others and they ran as fast and as far as they could. Shaw half-carried Katie as they slipped and slid and rolled across ground that, at best, should have been traveled over at a measured, cautious pace.

Two miles later they collapsed, flat on the ground, their breaths coming so hard that it sounded like they were sucking on their last bits of oxygen.

“How?” Whit finally said as he sat up, his chest still heaving.

“I don’t know how,” answered Shaw. “He outmaneuvered us.”

Reggie slowly sat up. “We have to keep going. If we have to jump in the Belle Strait and swim to a boat, that’s what we have to do. We stay here we die.”

Whit punched his knife into the dirt. “Get a clue. We are dead. It’ll be the dogs on us next. We’ve got no chance, Reggie.”

Shaw stood, helping Katie up with him. “Reggie’s right. We have to keep moving.”

Whit looked up at him. “You really think that will make any difference?”

“No, but I’m going to make that son of a bitch work a little bit more for it. How about you?”

Reinvigorated, Whit slipped the knife in his pocket and jumped to his feet. They ran as hard as they could to the water.

WHAT WAS LEFT of Alan Rice was swept into plastic trash bags and carried off. The gorged dogs, blood running down their jowls, were corralled with the long metal control poles and their muzzles were once more attached. Sitting on his haunches, his rifle lying across his thighs, Kuchin watched this work even as he muddled over his next maneuver.

He looked off into the distance. Water. It was a requirement of life. They would be heading there now. It was logical. Indeed, it was their only option. He could kill them all easily right now, but that wasn’t the point. Kuchin could have shot Shaw when he went to Rice’s aid or after Shaw fled the dogs. Yet again, it wasn’t when they were going to die. It was how. And he would dictate those terms. And they had done one thing that he assumed they would. He rose, and as he did so he smiled. They would not understand the significance of their action now, of course. But he intended to point it out moments before it was all going to end.

One down, three to go. Well, two down if he counted the man back at the house, but Kuchin didn’t really care about that. He already had the order of deaths planned out. The woman would go last. Kuchin had not forgotten his earlier desire. He would possess her and then finish her. He could think of no better revenge. And her death would be by far the most painful of any of them. In his backpack he had his skin peeler. He would see if he could beat his record of under one hour. He felt that he could. He could already hear her screams in his mind.

“Pascal?” he said, and the small man appeared next to him almost immediately.

“Yes, Mr. Waller?”

“It is time to move on, I think.” He looked to the sky. The darkest moment of night had come and gone. Above him now was the very earliest appearance of the tipping point of night passing to dawn. “They will be heading to the strait. The ships.”

Pascal nodded in agreement. “The channel is wider than they probably think. And there was an ice floe reported there yesterday, hugging the Labrador side. All the ships will stay well to the south of that. They will see no ships.”

“I believe they will realize that when they arrive there. It will be lighter then. They will wait and they will try to signal in the hope that there is something out there. The gun safe was intact?”

“Yes sir. We checked after they left. We’d emptied it of all the weapons and ammo just in case they were successful in breaking into it. They only took knives. The big man used his on one of the dogs, but he seems fine.”

Kuchin stroked the barrel of his custom-built rifle. “A knife. A poor weapon against this.”

“I can take the shortcut and turn them back towards you. Tactically, they will have nowhere else to go except into the strait.”

“Do that, Pascal. Drive them to me.” He pulled out a pocket map and Pascal shone a light on it. “Drive them there.” He indicated a spot on the map.

“It’s a good choice,” said Pascal, nodding his head approvingly. He looked back at one of the trucks where they were loading the trash bags with the remains of Alan Rice.

“He was a stupid man.”

“He was actually a very smart man, which can make someone do very stupid things. In intelligence there is ambition. And in ambition there is peril.”

“If you say so, Mr. Waller.”

“Drive them to me, Pascal.”

THERE WAS nothing. No ships visible certainly, but not even a light on the water that would indicate one was close by. And to impede matters more, a fog was rolling in from off the strait. Shaw stood and looked over at the others and then at the rocks below. “We can climb down there, hide until something comes along.”

The other three looked wearily up at him. “Postpone the inevitable?” said Whit.

“I like to think of it as securing a defensive position. At least then he has to come down and try and take us.”

“Or stand up here on the high ground and pick us off one by one,” pointed out Reggie. “We never even saw from where he shot Rice. But it was a hell of a long way away.”

“You have a better idea?” asked Katie.

Reggie toed the rock with her sneaker. “Not really, no.”

Shaw looked back at where they had come from. “What are you thinking?” asked Reggie.

“He outmaneuvered us once. I’d like to return the favor this time.”

“How? He has every tactical and strategic advantage.”

Whit added, “And he has guns and dogs that would make the Hound of the Baskervilles seem like a bleeding Pekinese.”

Shaw squatted down, thought about this. He looked at the lightening sky. “The fog could help us hide.”

Reggie nodded. “It could, but chances are pretty good the sun will burn it off and then we’re exposed again. And while we can probably make our way down those rocks, I don’t see us making our way back up. And there’s not a lot of cover down there. We could be halfway down and he could stand up here and pick us off.”

“Only good thing about that,” said Whit, “is that the dogs won’t be able to get down there to have a nice dinner.”

Katie stood. “Jesus, people, Shaw is trying to think of a way to get us out of here and all you can do is-”

Shaw put a hand over her mouth and looked around. They all heard it. Something was moving to the right and above them. Shaw motioned to the others to follow him. They set off to the left, away from the noise.

“Look, Shaw!” said Reggie, pointing back.

They all stood still, watching as it snaked down the cliff. A rope with a bag attached. It reached the bottom and the rope went slack, the plastic bag fell over on its side.