Drowning in Amber (A Marie Jenner Mystery Book 2) (36 page)

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re going to be fine.”

Oh my God, he had a plan. He actually had a plan! Relief ran through me like cool spring water, and I would have cried if I’d had the time.

I didn’t though, because R was waving his gun at us. “It’s time,” he said. “Move.”

CRANK HAD TAKEN
a bullet to the brain pan, and the bits of skull and brain were scattered all over the floor and far wall of the basement. Kinda made me feel sick, seeing it. But Crank acted like it wasn’t even there.

“You gotta help me,” he said. It was the third time he’d said it, and I was getting tired of hearing his voice.

“Go to hell,” I said and then laughed at my pathetic excuse for a joke. A black light bee popped out of Crank’s skin, right next to the bullet hole, and he flinched as it bit.

“What’s going on?” he said, touching his fingers to his face. “Why does it hurt?”

“Because you got shot,” I said. “Maybe?”

“No. It’s like a hornet or a wasp,” he said. Then he stopped and stared. “R shot me.” A tear seeped from his last good eye and hung, glowing, on his lower lashes. That bullet had done a crapload of damage. “He shot me.”

“Yeah.” Suddenly, I didn’t feel so vengeful anymore. Crank looked so scared. So hurt.

He sniffled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish things had turned out different. You know?”

Another black wasp of light popped through his skin. He flinched and then watched it bumble around him, as though it was looking for a place to light.

“I hate wasps,” he said. “I’m allergic. You know?”

I distantly heard yelling coming from upstairs, and then the crying and wailing of women. My mom was up there somewhere, and I knew I should be more worried about her, but I wasn’t.

A third wasp light bled through his skin. Also black.

“You can decide, you know,” I said. “Where you go.”

“How do you know that?” Crank watched a fourth and then a fifth black light pop out of his skin, barely flinching this time.

“Noreen told me,” I said. “And Marie.”

He snorted tired laughter. “You shouldn’t listen to a couple of skanks,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

The black lights were popping out of him in multitudes now. I could barely see his form in the blizzard, and I took a step back.

“I think they do,” I said. “Just choose something else. Anything else.”

“And what?” he asked. “Clean slate?”

“I guess.”

“No,” he said, and one more tear, this one blood red, slipped down his ruined face. “I’ll go with my boys. I’d rather be in hell with them than anywhere with you. You were always just a tourist, you know? Just a junkie tourist. You didn’t commit to the life. Not like me. I’ll pick my boys every time.”

The black blizzard took him, and I only felt a tiny pull. Like feeling a tornado from a mile away.

I wasn’t going with him. I was going somewhere else. And Marie was going to help me get there.

If she got out of here alive.

“MOVE.” R’S VOICE
crashed over us like frozen river gravel. One of the women cried out, a long, low wail that didn’t stop. I wondered, distantly, how she could keep it up so long without breathing.

“Shut up,” R said, and the noise stopped as though the woman had lost her vocal cords. I watched Bea reach a hand to the woman, patting her shoulder.

“Come on, dear,” she said. “We mustn’t do anything to antagonize him further.”

The woman, her hand still pressed to her mouth to stop her wail, clutched Bea’s hand as though it were a life preserver. Then she looked at me. They all looked at me. I was the only one still sitting on the floor.

“All right.” I sighed. “I’ll get up.”

Easier said than done, I must say. It took James and Bea both to pull me upright. My head hurt, and I could still see flashes of light at the corners of my eyes. A concussion, I bet. How the heck had James recovered so quickly?

I glanced at him, but he still had that sunny, happy-go-lucky smile on his face. “Can you walk?” he asked.

I nodded, hoping I wasn’t lying to him.

“On your own?”

I nodded again, then stopped when I felt my brain sloshing. “I think so,” I said.

“Good.”

He stepped away from me and walked among the women, whispering words of encouragement. I noticed that R wasn’t telling him to shut up or anything. Was probably glad of the help, because Ambrose Welch had disappeared down the short hallway and through a door.

“I can’t see this,” he said. “Plausible deniability and all that.”

“I understand.” R pointed at the other doorway. The one we were to walk through. “Go,” he said. “Now.”

I tried taking a step, stumbled sideways, and ran into one of the women. Naomi, Eddie’s mom.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and straightened.

“I guess I should have left this to the police,” Naomi replied. Her lips were white, and she kept licking them as though it would help somehow.

“I guess we all should have,” I said. I clutched the sleeve of her coat, and we stumbled together through the doorway into a small, filthy, old-fashioned kitchen. In the far wall was another doorway, leading down, presumably, to the basement.

James was at the front of the line of women, urging them forward and asking them to keep calm, please keep calm. He sounded like a flight attendant trying to get hysterical passengers off a burning plane, but his calm voice was working. The women were filing down the stairs, quietly and one at a time.

James looked past us to R, who was bringing up the rear. Then he turned and pushed his way through the line of women and down the stairs and out of sight.

R pushed at Naomi and me, and I could feel the cold steel of the gun barrel in my back.

“Please,” I said. “Not so fast. I feel sick.”

“I don’t care,” he replied.

“I’ll help her,” Naomi said. “I will.”

R didn’t answer. But he kept the gun in my back as we stumbled down the stairs and into the basement proper.

The women milled about near the stairs. One—the one who had been wailing earlier—was staring at the far wall and sobbing uncontrollably. I glanced and saw gore splashed liberally all over the far wall.

It looked fresh. It was probably Crank’s. Then I frowned. Even though R had obviously hidden the body somewhere, I should have been able to see his spirit. Where was he? And Eddie? Why couldn’t I see Eddie?

“Oh my God,” I gasped and picked up my pace. My head was spinning so terribly, I was certain I was going to fall, was going to black out, but I had to find Eddie. I had to save him. “Where is he?”

“He’s dead!” the wailing woman screamed.

“He’s dead,” R said in his ice-cold, gravelly voice.

“Of course he’s dead,” I muttered. Then I realized he was probably talking about Crank.

“And he’s gone.” Eddie’s voice wafted in from somewhere, more in my head than in the room, and I looked around frantically.

I could have cried in relief when I saw him swirl through a small door at the far end of the room. He was clear and looked oddly calm, as though nothing that was happening on this plane of existence was having any effect on him at all any longer.

I shambled two more steps toward him, and I felt the cold ring that was the barrel of the gun pressing into my back disappear. R had stopped walking forward. I was free.

“She’s there,” Eddie said, pointing at the door. “Honoria. She’s in there.”

I didn’t know why R had stopped. To assess the situation, to check that he had enough bullets to kill us all. I didn’t know why he stopped, but he had.

“Duck,” Eddie said.

So I did, and a bullet slapped into the cement wall just above me. Behind me, I heard a fleshy clap and a grunt, and the women started to scream.

James and R were on the floor, fighting for the gun. R was huge and looked like he was built entirely of rock-hard muscle, which should have given him an advantage, but it wasn’t working out that way. James had caught him off-guard and had him pinned to the ground as he grappled for the hand that still held the gun.

R’s finger on the trigger. I could see it and tried to yell, “Down!” even as R fired the gun into the cement wall by the stairs, spewing concrete chunks everywhere and causing the women to scream at an even higher register.

James grabbed and pulled the gun down, toward them both, and I was so afraid he’d be killed I almost threw myself on top of them, but someone grabbed me from behind and held me.

“He’ll win,” Bea grunted into my ear as she worked at holding my arms. “Don’t need you to get hurt, too.”

Another shot, this time into the ceiling by the stairs, and James said something—something I couldn’t make out—and then suddenly he had the gun. He slapped R with it twice. And then, when stupid R still insisted on grabbing at the gun, once more.

I’d never seen a pistol whipping before and truth be told, I don’t want to see it happen again. When James was through with R, his head was bleeding profusely and his eyes were rolling in his head as though he was on the verge of blacking out.

“Stay down,” James said, and stood.

At that moment, the door through which Eddie had materialized opened and a man walked through it, into the main room.

“What the hell—” he started, then pulled himself back as quickly as he could. Not quickly enough, of course, because James had the gun. He snapped off a shot without even seeming to aim and caught the man in the shoulder. The man disappeared, and the door slammed shut, but we could all hear him screaming.

“
Watch that one,” James said to the room at large and strode to the closed door. Bea picked up a length of two-by-four lying on the floor and planted herself by the now-unconscious R. She waved the board menacingly, as if daring the man to try anything. Anything at all.

James threw the door open and caught the man within still flailing in pain and trying, without any luck, to disengage his gun from his outsized pants.

“That gangster look is so last year,” I muttered as James quickly disarmed the man.

“Get her down,” James said, pointing to Honoria in the corner of the dirty, musty room.

She was hanging from a link of chain that was hammered into the exposed ceiling beams, her toes barely touching the floor. She looked so much like her sketch that it stopped me in my tracks. Even the car batteries, sitting beside her, just like the picture she’d drawn.

“Jesus,” I muttered. Then I tottered up to her and did my best to free her.

My best was not good, but luckily Eddie’s mother, Naomi, came into the room and helped me. Meaning she did most of the freeing while I flailed around like I had a concussion or something. Which I did.

Soon Honoria was sitting on the floor, still mostly unconscious, with Naomi’s arm around her protectively. “You poor dear,” she said, over and over. “You poor poor dear.”

Honoria groaned.

“Is she going to be all right?” It was Eddie’s voice in my head. He materialized by his mother, as clear as glass. So ready to move on, it seemed that a small breeze would push him through to the next phase of existence.

“Yes,” I said and smiled at him, even though his mother thought I was speaking to her. “I hope so.”

“Good,” he said. “Even though she still freaks me the hell out.”

Me too, Eddie. Me too.

WE MOVED BACK
out into the main area of the basement and James checked R. Still unconscious, with Bea still standing over him with her length of two-by-four at the ready.

“He’s not going anywhere,” she said. “Not while I still have breath in my body.”

“Let’s just tie him up,” James said. He pulled a length of wire from somewhere and quickly hogtied the huge man, who groaned once and then fell silent and still.

“That’s a good boy,” James muttered and patted R’s unconscious face. Then he stood and looked around the room. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “Any ideas?”

The rest of the women looked at the walls with three small, high, wood-covered windows. One of them, the wailer I thought, ran up to one of the windows and attempted to pull down the wood. No luck, and she turned back to James and shrugged.

“Maybe you can get it down?”

I didn’t pay any more attention to the women or the windows. I looked at Eddie.

“Maybe you can use the tunnel,” he said.

“Tunnel?” I asked, thinking I had probably heard him wrong. A bad knock on the head could do that to you.

“Tunnel?” James said, and I shut my eyes briefly. Internal had gone external again, and he was staring at me as though I was some kind of a freak. “What tunnel?”