Last Lie (28 page)

38

I
sprinted across the lane, around the corner of the house, directly to the rock outside the basement door where Diane and I had stumbled, in my case literally, across the spare key.

I was working under the assumption that Jonas was in his old home. Why? I didn't know. But he wasn't a kid to wander the hills in the dark.

He'd been truly torn about the recent sale of the house where he was raised. He was very conflicted about any planned alterations.

The key wasn't where it had been. I lifted the stone--it weighed a good five pounds--with plans to use it to bust out the glass in the basement door. That, I figured, would be almost as effective as the damn key.

Though not quite so quiet. On a whim, I tried the doorknob first. The door swung open.

My conclusion? Someone else had used the key under the rock. The question was who. I had two candidates: either Jonas, or the asshole responsible for stabbing my dog.

I dropped the rock. I shifted the flashlight to my right hand. Hefted it. Swung it once at forty-five degrees, from high to low. From right to left.

If I didn't see Jonas, my target was going to be the side of the asshole's head. His ear was my bull's-eye.

I can do this,
I told myself. I wasn't convinced. I whispered, "Jonas?"

Nothing. I poked my head into the laundry room. "Jonas?"

Nothing. I edged a few steps down the hallway that led toward the rooms at the back of the basement. "Jonas?"

Almost immediately, I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs that led down to the basement. Someone was coming down. It was either my son or someone I didn't want to see. I wasn't feeling particularly lucky.

I could run, or I could confront the danger. I could go outside and knock on the door--or ring Adrienne's God bell--and try to engage whoever answered in some reasonable discussion about the whereabouts of my son.

The last option was winning out. But as I retraced my steps toward the door, the first thing I saw coming down the stairs was the barrel of a revolver.
There,
I thought,
goes the ringing-God's-doorbell option.
I quickly backed into the laundry room, wondering why the man needed a gun to confront an eleven-year-old boy and praying there was no one already in the laundry room waiting to ambush me. The footsteps stopped. "Kid? Are you down here? Are you fucking down here? I swear, I'll . . . Come on, I saw you take that, kid. With my own eyes. I know you did. It's no big deal. I just want to know if that's the first time."

Take what? Has Jonas been stealing from the house? Jesus.

Despite my concerns, my heart soared a little with the man's threat. The odds that Jonas was still alive had just jumped considerably. I listened to two more footfalls as the man--the unfamiliar voice was a male's--edged farther down the stairs.

"Kid?" he said again as he tried unsuccessfully to make his voice sound less menacing than it was. That tactic might have been successful with somebody else's son. Not with my son. And not with Adrienne's. Jonas was already way too cynical. His menace radar was fine-friggin'-tuned. "Kid?" the man repeated. "I'd like to know how you got in here. Come on. This isn't the first time you did that? Right? I'm right? Just a few questions? Want to see what you have in there. Come on, come on. Talk to me."

The sound I heard next baffled me. It was a quiet noise--a quick
swish, scrape, swish.
All the component parts of the measure took no more than a second, combined. I couldn't place what they were. The progression of notes ended with a muffled thud. I could have sworn the thud had been right behind me.

Like
right
behind me. A pair of footfalls told me that the person on the stairs had taken two more steps down. I feared that he might have heard the same sound I had.

I turned my head slowly to check behind me for the source of the noise, trying to keep one eye peeled on the open laundry room door. The flashlight was high above my right ear. Locked and loaded.

Holy shit. Holy . . . shit.

"Kid? You know you've backed yourself into a corner, don't you? There are no doors back there. No windows. You have to come back my way. You ready for that? It's all us at the end, you and me. Why don't you just come out? Save us some fuckin' drama. Just tell me about your other visits. What else you took. I think you know what I mean, kid."

I did not know the voice. It wasn't Mattin Snow with its hint of the empire.

Nor did I know what Jonas would have been taking from the house.

I heard the sound of the man trying to move his feet quietly on ancient linoleum. The person on the stairs was no longer on the stairs. He was in the basement, with me. Probably only a couple of steps from the landing at the bottom of the stairs. I imagined him filling the opening to the narrow hallway that led toward the warren of rooms in the back of the cellar.

The good news? Yes, I could find some good news. The man was under the impression that Jonas was hiding from him in the rear of the basement. In the wine room. Or the old root cellar. Or in that creepy, JonBenet-ish room with the door with the bad latch. Back there, somewhere.

It was good news because Jonas wasn't back there.

Jonas was someplace upstairs. Specifically, he was someplace upstairs that was near an access door to the laundry chute.

The sound I'd heard behind me was Jonas dropping his favorite T-shirt down the laundry chute, to me. The shirt was faded green and adorned with a sketched profile of a free climber on the impossibly vertical face of a flat boulder. The shirt had the simple inscription I ROCK below the drawing of the climber.

Jonas must have heard me say his name when I poked my head into the laundry room, and he'd sent his T-shirt down as a signal to let me know where he was. He knew I'd recognize his father's old shirt.

I listened for the sound of distant sirens. The sheriff had to be getting close to the lane. Had to be. I didn't hear a siren. I pulled out my phone. With one hand, I typed
where r u.

My thumb hovered above the SEND button. But I didn't press it.

I suddenly realized why Jonas hadn't been answering his phone. He had turned the power off. In this quiet house, the sound of a ringtone, or a text alert, or the distinctive buzz of a phone on vibrate mode, might alert the person who was after him to exactly where he could be found.

I killed the power on my phone for the same reason. Then I reached behind me and tapped ever so gently, three times, on the sheet metal on the inside surface of the laundry chute.

Jonas tapped back, just as gently.

From far in the back of the basement, I heard, "Damn it, kid. Come out. Let's talk."

I was wearing a beat-up pair of Toms. I slipped them from my feet. Then I made my move.

39

I
was three steps from completing a remarkably quiet climb to the top of the stairs when my stockinged foot found a wide board that squealed like a cat that had just had its tail stepped on.

Subterfuge was no longer an option. I ran like hell.

"God damn it, kid. Those doors are locked. Double-keyed dead bolts, every one of them. I have the key. You don't. You're still trapped. Come on. Let's talk. We can work this out. Be better for you if you come out and show me what you have."

I flew up the stairs to the second floor, again trying to be as quiet as I could be. I wanted whoever was pursuing me to waste some time searching on the first level.

I did not know the intricacies of the laundry chute system in the house. Were there multiple access doors? Or only one? If there was only one, it would certainly be in the central hallway, upstairs. I ran there first. The linen closet that faced the hallway was bare. I did not see a chute door inside. I whispered, "Jonas."

No reply. I noted the hallway light. Had it been the upstairs light responsible for the moving shadows? Had Jonas been moving? Or had it been his pursuer?

I moved on to the master bedroom. I hadn't been in the room since Mimi and Mattin had bought the house. To my shock, the bedroom looked like a space out of a design magazine. It was completely decorated. Four-poster bed. Abundant linens. A plush sofa adjacent to the foot of the bed. Stuff--"accessories," Diane would say--everywhere. A flat-screen the size of a minor Great Lake on the far wall.

The walk-in closet in the master, another of Peter's finely crafted creations, was full of clothes. I spotted a hinged door on a lovingly fitted bench on one side of the large closet. I lifted the small door.

A laundry chute. Definitely. I lowered my head into the opening and said, "Jonas?"

He replied, "Cubby."
Of course.

Another voice intruded. "I'm coming upstairs now, you little fuck."

As much as I'd grown to despise the man's voice, I appreciated the heads-up about his plans. I could hear his feet squeaking on the hardwood floor as he moved across the main level toward the staircase.

I hugged the hallway wall as I edged toward Jonas's room and his cubby. I had the big flashlight ready. I was feet from Jonas's door when I saw the top of a stocking cap. The man was making his way slowly up the staircase that was parallel to the hallway where I was standing. He was already about halfway up. I wasn't going to get past him in time to protect my son.

I held my breath. He took another step. He began to turn his head. In my direction. In the hand that wasn't on the railing, he held the gun. I thought of Emily's wound and decided he probably had a knife, too.

Time was up. I lunged across the hall toward the railing while I simultaneously began to swing the flashlight down as hard and fast as I could. I had already decided that I was cool with any impact location covered by the man's stocking cap.

In retrospect, the assault was a move that I wished I'd had an opportunity to practice. At least once or twice.

MOMENTUM--mine--it turned out, was not my best friend.

The force of my leap across the hall, coupled with the downward tomahawk motion of the heavy Maglite, combined with the sudden impact, just below my waist, of the rigid stairway railing, launched me over said railing toward the man on the stairs in the stocking cap as efficiently as if it had been my plan all along.

Catapulting over the railing headfirst had, of course, not been my plan all along.

And the move I ended up making was not a particularly graceful one. Still, in the microsecond that I was accepting that I was, indeed, launched, and cognizant that my best hope for doing something effective would be
before
I crashed into whatever surface the laws of physics determined I was about to crash into next, I was determined to do some damage--and hopefully not just to myself--with the swinging flashlight.

I continued to force the downward motion with my hand. Somehow I managed to impact my primary target--the stocking cap--with the flashlight. Hard? Not really. Hard enough? Maybe. As the man either collapsed from the blow or fell pulling away from it, his head swung away from the arc of the flashlight and came straight into my thrusting right knee.

I hadn't been aiming my right knee at his head--other than the flashlight chop, none of my midair contortions could have been considered anything as intentional as "aiming"--but the concussion of his head with my right knee felt much more solid to me than had the initial impact of the flashlight with his skull.

He fell and tumbled down the stairs. My momentum carried me across the staircase until my right hip walloped into the railing on the far side of the stairs, barely escaping the indignity and agony of a forced landing with the opposing railing firmly planted between my legs.

Then I, too, tumbled down the stairs. I landed on top of the asshole. He was groggier than I was. My knee hurt, I suspected, more than his did. His head, I hoped, hurt much more than my knee.

I was desperately trying to find his gun. He was wriggling below me, more interested it seemed in collecting his senses than in finding his weapon.

The flashlight was gone. I couldn't spot or feel the gun. I knew I had to get back to Jonas. I wound up and hit the man as hard as I could with my fist. In his face.

He fell facedown. He stopped wriggling.

I was pretty sure I'd done some damage to my damn hand.

40

"
J
onas," I said in a whisper. "It's Alan. Let's get out of here. Hurry."

He wasn't in the cubby. He wasn't in the closet. That told me he was between them in the hidden passageway his father had constructed as an entrance to the knothole.

In his muffled voice, I heard, "Closet's open."

One of the panels in the closet was indeed open. The entrance was a slot really, a mostly vertical space, not big in any dimension. I would have to contort my body to fit through it. I had no way to know how much room there would be to maneuver if I made it inside.

"Come on out," I said.

He hesitated for a moment before he said, "Okay."

From the hallway came a chilling threat. "I will . . . kill . . . fucking both of you."

The man from downstairs was not unconscious. Nor was he trying to sneak up on us. "I'm coming in," I told Jonas.

Jonas whispered, "He has a gun."

"Saw that," I said. I lowered my head and shoulders into the opening and pulled myself inside. The second my feet cleared the passageway Jonas closed the door behind me. The mechanism involved a motor. I could hear the hum. That's all I could tell about it in the complete darkness inside. I felt all around me. I was in a space about two feet by two feet by four feet. Jonas was on an even smaller ledge right above me. That ledge, I guessed, provided access to the cubby.

I felt Jonas's hand on my head. Then I felt his breath on my ear. He whispered, "He can shoot us right through the wall."

Probably,
I thought. Jonas could feel me nod my head.

"Can you climb?" he said.

"Climb what?" I asked.

"Rocks," he said.

"What?"

Jonas said, "I think maybe we need a plan, boychik."

It almost made me laugh. It was something his mother would have said.

That's when I smelled smoke. The asshole, it seemed, had a plan. He planned to burn us, or smoke us, out into the open. Then he would shoot us.

I didn't see any immediate flaws in his plan.

But it turned out he was an impatient adversary. Twenty seconds later, maybe, he fired the first shot. I had to guess where he'd aimed. My guess, based on the noise and the reverberation in our hiding place, was that he'd aimed into the wall below the cubby. He'd surmised that the entrance Jonas had used to disappear into the hidden space involved a trapdoor of some kind. Not a bad assumption. Two more shots followed in quick succession into the same general location.

He'd missed us with those first shots by a good four feet. I was gripping Jonas's hand as tightly as I dared.

For a wonderful ten seconds, I thought the man was done with the shooting and that the only immediate mortal danger we were left to confront was fire. The eleventh second proved me wrong. The guy squeezed off three more quick shots. All three went into the back wall of the closet. One a little higher than the first, one a little lower.

The last one was two feet from my head. Max. I almost squealed.

I recognized a pattern. He was getting methodical, shooting bullets like a photographer shoots pictures, bracketing his exposures.

I recognized the modification to the asshole's plan: although he realized he could eventually smoke us out into the open, his current plan involved an option of shooting us in place, just before he cremated us in place. I couldn't find any holes in his plan from a killing-us perspective. I thought it would work just fine. Forensically, though? He was leaving way too much to chance. The crime scene guys and the arson guys would figure this out.

Of course, they'd figure it out way too late to do Jonas and me any good, but they'd get there. What did that tell me? It reconvinced me that the asshole trying to kill us wasn't Mattin Snow. He was too smart to leave this kind of trail behind.

The gun I'd seen in his hand earlier was a revolver. The man had fired six shots so far. Sam had told me once that most revolvers were six-shooters. If that one was a six-shooter, and the man had more ammunition, he would be reloading.

"Where are those rocks for me to climb?" I whispered to Jonas, desperate for an escape, hoping he'd been something approximating serious with his earlier question.

"Up," Jonas said. "Or down."

I had no idea what he was talking about. He took my hand and pulled my arm to full extension. I had to contort my body to allow him to pull it even farther. He finally closed my hand around an uneven protrusion on a wall about three feet from where I was sitting. I didn't know what it was that I was feeling.

"What?" I said. Jonas grabbed my hand and moved it over and up a few feet. I had to reach as far as I could to get my hand where he wanted it. He placed my fingers on another uneven protrusion. The second was the same sort of thing as the first. But a different shape. "What?" I whispered again.

"A rock wall. Goes up to the attic. Down to the basement. Dad did it."

I drew a blank at first. Then I got it.
Peter removed the old dumbwaiter and constructed an interior climbing wall from his basement to his attic? Of course he did.
I said, "Peter built a climbing wall in here?"

"Who else?" Jonas said. He said that with pride.

"In the dumbwaiter?"

"Yep. For me."

"Let's go then," I said. "You go first."

"I'm . . . afraid of heights."

Two shots pierced the wall just below the ledge where Jonas was sitting. Two more to the right. Two to the left. All in a period of ten seconds of abject terror.

The asshole had extra ammunition. He had started bracketing horizontally as well as vertically. The last two shots would have hit me if I hadn't moved to feel the rock wall.

He'd fired six more shots. He had to be reloading again.

To Jonas, I whispered, "You're not as afraid of heights as I am of guns. Hold on to my back. I'll do the climbing." To me, if there was an easy exit from the attic, up seemed safer than down--the man was firing into the wall below us. Up was also a much shorter climb--five feet versus twenty-five feet. Jonas tightened his arms around my neck. I began feeling for handholds and footholds in the dark.

I whispered, "Is there a good way out of the attic?"

"A door drops down into Ma's closet," Jonas whispered.

"We're going up then," I said. The gables on the old house had big vents. If I had to, I could kick one out.

"When Dad took out the dumbwaiter, he extended the chute all the way to the attic. Same time he did my knothole. He thought I'd be a climber, like him. He wanted it to be something special just for us."

Peter knew damn well that Adrienne wasn't going to hang around in there.

I felt around me. The climbing wall was a square chute. I guessed it was forty inches on a side. It had footholds and handholds randomly placed on all four faces.

I can do this,
I thought.

I had never been rock climbing in nature. I had never done an interior rock wall.

Jonas, of course, asked, "Do you rock climb?"

I thought about lying. It didn't seem like a good time for that. "I do now," I replied.

"Oy," Jonas said.

Oy,
indeed. I was wondering if a twenty-foot-plus fall down a defunct dumbwaiter lined with fake rocks would kill us.

Frankly, I wasn't in love with our odds. My right hand was barely usable. I really had done some damage to myself when I punched the asshole in the face. In my life, I'd hit two men in the face. Both times had yielded great personal satisfaction. And both times I'd injured my damn hand. I was missing something, I figured, technique-wise. If Jonas and I lived, I would work on that. Take some lessons on how to hit adversaries in the face. Jonas and I could do it together. Gracie could come, too.

The climbing was slow, but I had plenty of adrenaline to provide buoyancy. I would get to the attic in five or six feet.
I can do this. I can do this.
My silent words were 20 percent confidence, 80 percent psychological cheerleading.

Jonas said, "Is that a siren?"

I listened. "Yeah. It is. That's great. Help is here."

Down below us, near where we'd started, I heard some loud concussions begin. Five or six of them, in succession. Like the asshole was kicking at--

Suddenly smoke filled the dumbwaiter core. Earlier, I'd been able to smell it, and even taste it. But suddenly I could see the smoke. Lots of it. We were being forced to breathe it.

The asshole was kicking holes in the drywall, or plaster, or whatever the walls were made of in Jonas's room. He was breaking down fire-protection barriers, making sure that the fire, and the smoke, would be able to move unimpeded into the parts of the house where Jonas and I had retreated.

Right below guns on my list of fears was fire. Snakes and bees were right up there, too, but at that moment? At the top of the list? Other people's guns. And fire.

The only good news I could think of? I was thinking the asshole might be out of ammo. The kicking stopped.

I reached up with my beat-up hand and felt a flat horizontal surface above my head. I pushed on it. It did not give. Not even a little.

"I'm there. How do we get into the attic?" I asked.

"I don't know," Jonas said into my ear.

"You don't know?" I whispered incredulously over my shoulder.

"I'm afraid of heights, remember? I've never been up here."

Jonas had a lot of his mother in him. A lot.

The irony that Peter Arvin--a rock-climbing legend in Colorado--would have a firstborn son who was phobic of heights would be something I would have to ponder some other time. "It feels solid above us," I said. "No opening. You don't know if there's a latch? A trick? Your dad liked tricks. Secrets."

"He did. But I don't know. I've never been up here. Feel for a knob or something carved."

More sirens below us. I thought I could even hear some yelling. Help had arrived.

I tried to remember whether I had told Diane to get the fire department to respond. I didn't think I did. I'd said police. I'd said ambulance. Not good foresight on my part.

To take advantage of the first responders, all we had to do was get out of the damn dumbwaiter and get past the asshole who was waiting for us in the house with a gun. With or without bullets. The smoke was getting bad. We had to do all that fast.

"Nothing, Jonas. Can you reach your phone?" I asked.

He answered my question with a question. "Where's yours?"

"Lost it fighting the asshole."

"Mine's in my pocket. But I don't think I can . . . hold on to you with one arm."

"Sure you can. You ready to try?"

He hesitated. I waited. "Okay," he said finally. He pulled one arm from around my neck. I could feel his other arm quiver.

Seven, eight seconds later, he said, "Oops." I heard a thud. "Dropped it."

I sighed. "No worries. Hang on tight."

"Let's go down to the first floor," Jonas said. "I know how to get out there."

"Then that's our plan." I dropped my left leg down, feeling for purchase on a fake rock. Did it again with my right. I repeated the motions.

I was finding a rhythm. We soon passed the opening to Jonas's cubby, where I still feared the asshole was waiting for us with fresh ammo. We continued down.

The smoke wasn't quite as thick below the cubby as it had been above. We were making progress.

"You good?" I asked my son.

"Good enough for government work," he coughed into my ear.

My good hand slipped. My not-good hand was not so good. It slipped, too.

My feet were each on solid footholds. Jonas was on my back. As my hands slipped we teetered backward, not down, impacting the opposite wall with a deadening
thunk.
I waited for my feet to slip from their tiny ledges.

My toes ached in a way I didn't know toes could ache. My feet didn't slip. They were on one side of the dumbwaiter core. Jonas was hanging on my back. His legs were hooked around my waist. We were leaning forty-five degrees toward the opposite wall of the core. Jonas was pinned between my shoulders and the other wall.

I didn't like the position we were in. Literally. Or figuratively.

I said, "Still cool?"

"You're kind of heavy."

I thought the muscles in my back were going to explode. I figured they would explode a few seconds after my quads did, which would happen after my toes went off like a string of firecrackers.

I recalled Rafa's admonition about quads and climbing steep hills. How you either have the determination in your heart, or you don't. Right then, I had it.

"Don't let go of my neck. Feel around, find places to put your feet, Jonas. Just feel around."

Almost immediately he said, "Got one." I could feel him continuing to kick around behind me. "Okay, okay, got another one."

As he began to assume his own weight, I felt stronger and lighter. The load on my quads lightened. My toes? Still a problem.

"Get as steady as you can get on those footholds. Balance yourself."

"Okay."

"Now take your hands from around my neck and put your hands flat on my back."

"Alan, I--"

"Trust me. Please."

He put his hands on my back. "As long as you keep pressure on my back with your hands, you will stay pinned on that wall. Think about it. Does that make sense?"

He thought about it. "Yes. It does."

"Now push on my back. As hard as you can. Like you're trying to force me away. It will pin you even more securely."

Jonas was stronger than I feared he would be. Not as strong as I hoped he would be. But his pressure on my back helped me reach across the shaft to my left and right. I found handholds on each side.

My feet continued to stay in place on the far wall.

"As I move forward, in order to keep your hands on my back, you will have to lean forward, too. As long as you keep as much pressure on my back as you can, you'll be fine."

"If you say so."

I began to use my arms to pull slowly away from Jonas. I could feel his hands increasing the pressure on my back. "It's working," he said. He sounded surprised.

"It'll work," I replied. I was trying not to sound anywhere near as lacking in confidence as I was feeling. I moved my feet off the far wall onto footholds on the sides, slightly below where Jonas was standing. I moved my hands to the wall in front of me and braced myself to resume carrying his weight.