Linwood Barclay - Parting Shot

He’d glance back sometimes into the cargo area, say, “I’m going to be famous. People are going to talk about me. I’m making a difference. You know what I am? I’m an instrument. An instrument of justice. Of revenge.”

He kept asking her what he should do next.

“It can’t be like the others,” he said. “Not like Pierce, not even like the one we fucked up. This time, it’s just a matter of getting the job done. Brought a little something of my dad’s to help me out.”

Total fucking whackjob.

For a while, she wondered, when she was in her more delirious state, whether he was with MetLife or something. Kept talking about her getting insurance. Then she realized she was the insurance. Yeah, that was what he was saying. Like she was a kind of hostage or something. His ace in the hole. When things went south, she was his ticket to safety.

Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe that meant he would keep her alive. But it didn’t mean that Carol Beakman wasn’t very, very frightened.

She wondered what services he might be expecting her to provide beyond hostage. So far, there was nothing to suggest that sexual predator was part of his profile. Not that that was any great comfort.

Stop thinking about that. Think about getting away. Think think think think.

When they’d reached their destination, she’d had the sense of being moved from the van into a building. Being carried over Cory’s shoulder, then being placed on a bed, a cot. Like one of those rollaway beds made of springs, with tubular metal framing. He put her face-down, tied her wrists to the top frame, ankles to the bottom.

Got her a blanket.

“I don’t think it’s worth making a fire,” he said. “And smoke coming out the chimney’s going to attract attention, maybe, you know?”

He gave her a nudge. “You waking up? You’ve been out a long time.”

She said nothing.

“You should be good for a while,” he said.

Again she said nothing. She’d been keeping her eyes closed as she regained consciousness, opening them only to slits to take in her surroundings. Then, if she heard the door open and close, and didn’t hear his breathing, she’d open her eyes wide.

She was in a shack. Some tiny cottage. She believed she was near water. She could smell ocean in the air, hear the squawking of gulls. And Cory had said they were going to Cape Cod. He’d followed someone here, that much she’d figured out. At one point she opened her eyes a millimeter and saw him holding something. But then he turned his back to her, and she lost sight of it.

It had looked like a gun.

Her fear went up a notch.

It was getting darker, and Cory did not want to turn on any lights in the cabin. He had pulled a wooden chair to the window on the far wall. He sat down and stared outside.

“They’re going out,” he said. “Shit. Where the hell are they going?”

In the dim light, Carol slowly began to twist her wrists against the rope that bound them to the top frame. Her fingers had been going numb, and when Cory had been looking the other way, she’d been wiggling them, trying to keep the circulation going. The rope around her ankles was not secured as tautly to the bottom frame, allowing her to inch her body further up the cot. When she had the opportunity, she’d be in position to get her teeth on the rope.

After a period of time — Carol was having trouble tracking the hours, but it was fully dark now — Cory got up from the chair and began to pace the room. “They’ve been gone for fucking ever! Where the hell are they? What if they’ve gone back and I’m sitting here?” He shook his head angrily. “Time to listen in again.”

He went outside. Carol thought she heard the sliding door of a van. Some time later — ten minutes, twenty? — he returned. She heard him muttering, “Nothing, nothing.”

And then he left.

Carol picked away at the ropes with her teeth, but she wasn’t making any headway.

A short while later, the door burst open again. Cory went back to his post by the window.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

Carol heard a car drive past the cabin.

“I bet they went to a movie,” she heard him say. “What else could keep them out that long?”

A pause, then, “Okay, good, good. They’re heading in.”

He stood quickly, took a couple of deep breaths. “This is it,” he said under his breath, before going out of the door and closing it behind him.

Carol didn’t know what “it” was, but she had a pretty good idea it wasn’t going to be anything good.

She inched forward again and resumed working at the rope with her teeth.

As best I could tell, the entire beach house was surrounded by fire. Something flammable — maybe gas, maybe something else that didn’t smell quite as strong — had been poured around the perimeter of the building. Flames licked above the first-floor window ledges.

“Cal!” Jeremy shouted from upstairs.

“Hang on!”

“Fire!” he said. “There’s a fire!”

I ran into the kitchen area and started throwing open cupboards. Even without any lights on, the glow from the flames was bright enough to make out shapes. I remembered seeing a fire extinguisher somewhere when we were opening cabinets and closets to see how well equipped the place was.

I found one under the sink. Not a huge one, but something that would do the trick to put out a small kitchen fire. The canister was no thicker than a soup can, and about a foot and a half tall. Maybe it would be enough to get us out the door. I grabbed it and pulled the pin that would allow foam to be propelled from it once I squeezed the trigger.

Then it occurred to me that there might be another way out.

Taking the extinguisher with me, I went up to the second floor, where I found Jeremy with his backpack slung over his shoulder.

“This way!” he said, heading toward the sliding glass doors that led to the elevated deck.

That was what I’d been thinking. The fire was at ground level, but the deck was attached to the second floor. We could escape through the glass doors, take the stairs down the side of the house and jump over the flames. If they were too high to do that, we could leap off the deck into the sand. I was confident it would break our fall.

Jeremy was heading for the doors when suddenly I reached for his arm and said, “No.”

“What?”

“That’s the way he wants us to go. It’s the one way out he’s left for us.”

Jeremy looked at me wide-eyed. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying he wants us to go out that door.”

“Who’s he ?”

The smell of smoke was getting stronger. The flames surrounding the first floor of the house were casting light into the second-floor windows.

“What’s gonna happen if we go out that way?” Jeremy asked, pointing to the deck.

We get picked off , I thought.

“It’s not safe.”

“It’s not safe to stay here!”

That was true, too.

If this guy Duckworth had warned me about was outside waiting for us to come onto the deck, where would he be?

The boardwalk. The roughly hundred-foot-long raised walkway that led over the grassy area to the beach. It would be the perfect place for someone to wait, rifle trained on the entry to the deck, and take us out, one after the other. A night scope would do the trick, but even without one, we’d be pretty visible. It was a clear night sky, and the fire was doing wonders to light up the surroundings.

“Back downstairs,” I said.

“You knew this was going to happen?” Jeremy asked, trailing me down the steps to the first floor. “That’s why you said we had to go?”