Pieces of Ivy (32 page)

She hurried from the front step to her car. She sat, shaking, pulling deep breaths—fighting for steady nerves.
What just happened
? Her intuition burning, Vicki’s fingers shook so badly that she had to hit Hank’s number four times before getting it right.

Voice mail.

“Fuck!”

She tapped a frantic text and tried his number again to leave a voice mail. As she persisted, she watched two cars pull into Jennifer Boss’s driveway. Out of the first came Angela Luther, the other, Brenda McQueen—each carrying casseroles.
Bullshit
, these women didn’t cook.

Stepping into the house, they all looked back at Vicki parked across the street for a moment before closing the door.

Her whole body was shaking, certain she was about to throw up. Vicki felt as if death’s bony fingers rested upon her shoulders as she drove—she couldn’t shake him.

“Why aren’t you picking up?” She listened to Hank’s voice mail greeting for the seventh time.

She intended to turn toward Hank’s motel twice but something stayed her hand. Something didn’t feel right. She kept driving. Night began to press against the waning colors of the day, and the black arc of storm clouds pushed deeper toward her—the orange firelight painting demonic faces against the churning clouds coming for her.

The storm’s first flash whitened her sight, certain she had seen the witch’s terrified face wink in and out of her vision—warning her. The deep rumble of thunder shook her as death’s bony fingers tightened their grip.

“Come on!” She dialed again. His recording beeped. “Damn it, Hank! Where are you? I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m fucking scared. Looks like I’m approaching Founder’s Square. Call me.”

She couldn’t help that her voice was on the verge of tears. She tapped End.
Founder’s Square
. The sheriff’s station was on the south side of the square. Thunder made her press the gas pedal harder.

She turned up Placid Drive as the first heavy drops burst against her windshield. She slowed to take a double-take.
Impossible.

Brianna McQueen was pacing beside Anita Garrett’s flower shop van, bawling—looking terrified.

Brianna saw Vicki and flew into a frantic wave. Vicki stopped as more heavy drops spilled against her view. A hook seated in her belly, refusing to let her get out of her car. The girl waved more frantically, confused that Vicki was just sitting there. Brianna started yelling something. Vicki opened her door only slightly, feeling the strongest pull to drive away.

“Oh, my God, help her! I think she’d dead. Please, help her!”

Vicki shared the panic in the girl’s face, casting aside her arrogant pretense.

“It’s another one!” she cried.

What? A body?
Duty overtook the torrent of lingering apprehension permeating Vicki’s terrified core. She leaped from her car and rushed toward the van.

Brianna was shaking hysterically, panicked, blocking her way. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” was all she could manage through her sobs.

Vicki looked toward the open driver’s side window, and then back at Brianna and asked, “Driver’s side?”

She could barely manage a nod. The poor girl had probably never seen a dead body so close-up before. Vicki slowly approached the driver’s door, resting her hand on her service weapon.

“Stay back,” Vicki insisted, calling to the girl’s tentative footsteps coming from behind. “I want to make sure it’s clear.”

Dead bodies weren’t normally a threat, but Vicki felt cautious just the same. She peered through the open window. The seat was empty. “What the—”

The sharp pinch barely registered, then came a burning in her neck. Her hand squeezed but slipped off her gun as she fell. She felt hands grabbing at her, dragging her into the belly of the van as her world went black.

† †
†

Hank patted himself down.
I think the little bitch took my cell phone.

His mind raced. After sending Alexis Luther on her way, he had remained a little unnerved by her bold advances. She had approached him, and then proceeded to stand closer and closer to him as they spoke. Looking him innocently in the eye, but rolling her words in the way that made good men think bad thoughts.

Her eager, sultry stare had melted into him as her small, soft chin had begun to quiver. She had continued to wash praise upon him as she shivered, both of them sensing the coming storm. He was trying to do right—be chivalrous—when he gave her his jacket.

Aware of the inappropriate energy she had been building between them, he was slow to stop it. He wouldn’t have acted, of course, but it had been hard to withdraw from the attention. She was gorgeous beyond her years, vulnerable and adoring—playing it so right.

He had offered his jacket just until they were finished their conversation. She had taken it happily and wrapped herself in tight, swaying back and forth in a show of playful gratitude. When their conversation had ended, she had returned his jacket and walked away, ensuring that his eyes would follow her longer than he ought to have.

Stupid.

A bad feeling overwhelmed Hank—and it wasn’t the heavy, stagnant air pressing beneath the violet and orange churning of angry rolling new-denim-blue clouds threatening overhead.

He saw a familiar face and ran up to Ugly Pete, Ivy’s drunken shortstop. “Give me your phone.”

“No way. I’m—”

“
Give it to me
!” He stripped it from Pete’s hand and called Vicki. No answer. Hank called his voice mail, listened and then threw the phone at Pete as Hank ran for his car.

Blindfolded, Vicki was tied down to something cold.
Where are my clothes
? The terror she felt in the woods washed through her. The dark man hadn’t been done with her after all. She choked against the ball gag in her mouth, her vision black, as the chill of the air waved over her gooseflesh.

She smelled old dust rather than the musty stink of the hold in the forest floor or the char of the catacombs. Her mind painted her lying in the first crime scene. The thought of being strapped down, naked, in the decaying gray barn sent shivers down the cold sweat of her spine.

She whimpered as his gloved hands squeezed her breasts hard. Suddenly there was a third hand on her thigh from the opposite side, rolling it outward against her resistance.
No!

Find me, Hank. Oh, please, God, find me.

† †
†

He couldn’t find her. Hank cursed himself for wasting too much time scouring the park near Vicki’s abandoned Corvette. He sped his vehicle recklessly down the dim, empty streets lining the square—narrowly missing cars, posts and curbs as he desperately scanned the buildings and bushes as they flew by.

The heavy black clouds churned above him, swallowing the last glimpse of moonlight as his belly twisted into cutting knots like never experienced before. His memory flashed.
The barn
! He forced his foot to the floorboard.

He didn’t know why he slammed on the brakes to avoid the cat. Black or not, Hank wasn’t superstitious. In fact, he would have no problem turning its guts to goulash if it meant a second longer to search for Vicki.

But he did slam on the breaks, and he did avoid the cat. Careening out of control along the midnight-cloaked, rain-soaked asphalt, he couldn’t avoid the cement water fountain, which rolled under his car, turning him over into the playground equipment at the edge of the park near the town square—killing all five of the bronze New Brighton founders.

Pulling himself free, he ignored the gnashing pain in his side and hip, cursing back his frustrated tears. The barn was too far—his furious cry into the empty square erased by a vicious clap of thunder. Convinced that Vicki was at the barn where Ivy’s body was found, a white flash from the heavens illuminated the scowling darkened buildings before him.

Another flash of square mournful faces snarled at him. An ember in his gut told him to look
here
. But with each flash, the row of slumbering structures refused to hint at where he should even begin. All he knew was that he needed to find her.

“A methodic search, Hank,” he reminded himself. “Remember your training.”

† †
†

Struggling, unable to scream, leather hands grabbed at Vicki, tightening her straps. She caught the shuffling of feet—lots of feet. Squeaks on the cold floorboards, drips from the leaking roof—and thunder.

A draft wafted, and she smelled a new petrifying threat, absent from the original crime scene—
gasoline.

The grinding metal of a heavy toolbox skidded along the floor, nearing her, and the chilling clink of metal on a tray accompanied a familiar vibration that now terrified her.

A fast grip seized her left arm and turned it outward. Vicki’s memory flashed to Sky’s engraving.

“What the fuck is this?” a harsh whisper snapped.

Vicki froze, certain the raspy whisper was female.

A less discernible whisper by her feet, answered, “Who cares? If you want it, cut it out of her.”

She couldn’t help it. Fear overwhelmed her training. So exposed and powerless, tears began to spill all over her face as she thrashed against her restraints.

Futile.

Catching a stifled snicker, defiantly female, Vicki whined with forced desperation between terrified whimpers against the harsh rubber ball in her mouth. She felt the firm, slick grease of lipstick circle her stretched lips.

Her bound eyes flashed white at the instantaneous sting of the hard leather slap breaking across her face. She had no time to recover when a second vicious slap hit her bare stomach and then repeatedly against her exposed groin followed by a violent barrage of stinging leather slaps across her upper thighs, breasts, arms and face.

She lost complete orientation as they came from everywhere, harsh and relentless, tenderizing her flesh with every sting. Pain stung her red skin on nearly every inch of her exposed body, and she choked on the spittle trickling back down her throat as she tried to cry out—begging them to stop.

Her ears rang to silence as the slapping stopped, and her flesh burned with the rapid pulses of her panicked heartbeat. Desperate breaths fought to obey her body’s demands as air rapidly sucked in and out of her wet nose, refusing her body enough.

She felt the sharp needles of oxygen depletion add to her skin’s torment and the wild spin of flashing stars swam in the blackness behind her tight blindfold. Consciousness teetering, she knew she had to calm her breathing—
impossible.

Not this. Please not now—not this way.

The worst of it was the callous cruelty she was being shown. As if Vicki—the person—was a useless lump of fleshy matter to be teased and trifled with at someone’s whim. Her inhumane insignificance was too horrifying to emotionally reconcile.

Vicki had chosen a risky vocation. She loved her work—was drawn to it, passionate about it—but she didn’t want to die. She knew she had lived a charmed life. She had most of what she wanted. But there was so much more to experience, so much more to do. So much more love to give. Too soon—this was too soon.

Please, God, not now. Not yet.

True fright overtook all other autonomic function as the soul-seizing sound of metal instruments danced across a steel tray as the wheels of a cart began to roll closer toward her. She started convulsing against her bonds, trying to pierce the hard rubber ball with her stifled screams. Tools scrapped against the tray as they lifted.
Oh, God.

She felt a long, burning sting as a sharp slice carved into the side of her left breast.

“Vicki!” Her name echoed from within the crack of monstrous thunder.

Was this how the heavens called her forth? Hearing her name roll across the thunder as the agony sliced deeper, was God calling her home? Was this the way death would come to claim her soul—on a churning steed of dark thunder clouds?

“
Vicki
!”

This time her name came stronger, not riding on thunder, but from outside.

The cutting stopped. The shuffling feet and clinking tools froze for a moment. Her name came again, closer. She tried to scream against the ball.

Shoes scuffled quickly along with the echoing clunk of metal and plastic bins. A terrifying wave of gasoline fumes overwhelmed her sinuses, stifling her, robbing her of precious breath.

She heard confused, panicked rustling and a stampede of footfalls rushing away, plodding down dwindling steps. A hot blast crushed against her naked body as a
whoomph
of exploding vapor compressed the room.

Blazing heat intensified from her left as she thrashed against her bonds—pushing burning fumes in and out of her stinging nostrils. Behind her blindfold, she saw the little girl’s face on fire.

She struggled for breath as she cried harder and harder.

“
Vicki
!”

So close now.

A bang, another bang, a harder bang and then a crash, followed by a brief burst of cold air that was immediately consumed by more intense heat.

“Vicki!” Hank’s voice cut above the firestorm. Her eyes burst with larger tears, soaking her blindfold.

Hands seized her left strap and struggled.

“Hurry!” she tried to scream.

The hands were fighting hard, the heat intensified, and she couldn’t breathe. A cold slice cut against her wrist with a sharp sting but her struggling arm flew free.

She scrambled for the gag and coughed violently as her lungs drew in poisonous fumes rather than desperately needed air.

Another sharp sting on her right wrist and she threw herself upright. Her left leg released, and she toppled over the cool side of the steel table, dangling with a sharp pain from her suspended ankle. With a final slice, her legs crashed to the hard but cool floorboards.

Tearing away her blindfold, she couldn’t stand as stars and static seized her vision, and gravity won. Powerful hands grabbed her torso, and she felt gravity’s pull overcome by force. She was sailing upward as her world went black.

† †
†

His lungs fought to flee his chest, his left arm in flames. Hank threw Vicki over his right shoulder and rushed the busted door, leaping through the new wall of flames, hitting a torrent of hard rain and nearly spilling her onto the pavement before the storefront.

Catching his footing, he ran to the grass across the street as the front window cracked and exploded behind him. The face of the old building opened its shatte
red maw and lit up with flame.

He laid her down gently on the wet grass. “Vicki!”

She wasn’t responding. He pressed, repeatedly, hard thrusts against her icy-wet chest, again and again, sealing his mouth against her wet face as rain dumped on them—thunder and lightning tormenting his heart.

“
No
! Come on, Vicki. Stay with me.
Come on
!” He pushed again and again.

She coughed and cried, spitting her relentless screams against the pouring rain.

“Good girl, Vicki! Yes! Good girl! That’s it.” He pulled off his waterlogged leather jacket—still steaming from the flames—and raised her to wrap it around her. “Thank Christ. Oh, thank Christ.”

Still confused, she tried to struggle forward but he pulled her in tight and told her to remain still. He rolled them over so he leaned seated against a thick tree and pulled her bare bottom-half off the ground and onto his lap.

He held her against him, wrapped in his jacket, as he tore at his shirt—most of it tearing away in a single piece. He laid it over her trembling thighs as the sirens approached. He pressed the jacket sleeve against her left breast trying to stop the garnet flow.

She was shaking hard and sobbing harder.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” he repeated over and over as he tried to cleanse his lungs.

† †
†

Vicki’s mind raced. It was not okay—she had barely escaped slaughter.

Then they heard the girl’s desperate screams in the rainstorm. They looked out into the downpour.

Against the brightness of the burning building, spinning aimlessly in the middle of the street, Brianna McQueen was screaming, naked in the pouring rain.