Sacred: A Novel (28 page)

“In this house,” Julian hissed, looking back over his shoulder at the mansion. “She could be inside
this
house.”

Desiree shook her head. “She’s still out here. I know it. She’s waiting for her boyfriend. Aren’t you?” She called to the darkness, “Aren’t you?”

Something rustled to our left. The sound might have come from the hedges but it was hard to be sure with the surf raging just twenty yards away on the other side of the garden.

Julian bent by a row of tall hedges. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

Desiree pointed her gun to her left and let go of my hair. “The floodlights. We can turn on the floodlights, Julian.”

“I really don’t know about this,” Julian said.

A whisper of wind or surf noise curled against my ear.

“Goddammit,” Desiree said. “How could she have—?”

And something made the sort of squishing sound a shoe makes when it steps in a puddle of icy slush.

“Oh, my,” Julian said and shone the flashlight down on his own chest at the two shiny blades of garden shears that protruded from his sternum.

“Oh, my,” he said again and stared at the wooden handles of the shears as if waiting for them to explain themselves.

Then the flashlight dropped and he pitched forward. The blade points popped out through his back and he blinked once, his chin in the dirt, then sighed. Then nothing.

Desiree turned the gun toward me but it popped out of her hand as the handle of a hoe smashed into her wrist.

She said, “What?” and turned her head to her left as Angie stepped out of the darkness covered in dirt from head to toe and punched Desiree Stone so hard in the center of her face that I’m sure she was well into dreamland before her body hit the ground.

I stood by the shower in the downstairs guest bathroom as the water sprayed across Angie’s body and the last of the dirt sluiced down her ankles and swirled into the drain. She ran a bath sponge along her left arm, and the soap dripped down along her elbow and hung there for a moment in long teardrops before falling to the marble basin. Then she went to work on the other arm.

She must have washed each part of her body four times since we’d come in here, but somehow I was still entranced.

“You broke her nose,” I said.

“Yeah? You see any shampoo in here?”

I used a facecloth to open the medicine cabinet. I wrapped the cloth around a small vial of shampoo and squirted some into my palm, walked back to the shower.

“Turn your back to me.”

She did, and I leaned in and rubbed the shampoo into her hair, felt the wet tangles envelop my fingers, the soap churn up through the roots as my fingers massaged her scalp.

“Feels very nice,” she said.

“No kidding.”

“How bad’s it look?” She leaned forward and I pulled my hands from her hair as she raised her arms and scrubbed her hair with more force than I’d ever use on my own hair if I intended to reach my forties with it still attached to my head.

I rinsed the shampoo off my hands in the sink. “What?”

“Her nose.”

“Bad,” I said. “Like there’s three of them all of a sudden.”

I came back to the shower as she tilted her head back under the water and the white foamy mixture of soap and water poured between her shoulder blades and cascaded down her back.

“I love you,” she said, her eyes closed, head tilted back to the spray, her hands wiping the water away from her temples.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She threw her head forward and reached for the towel as I put it in her hand.

I leaned in and shut off the water and she wiped her face, blinked her eyes open and found mine. She sniffed at water in her nose and wiped her neck with the towel.

“When Lurch dug the hole, he dug it too deep. So when he threw me in there, my foot hit a rock sticking out of the wall of dirt on the way down. About six inches above the bottom. And I had to tense every muscle in my body and keep my foot on this little ledge. And it was hard. Because I was looking up at this prick shoveling dirt on me with absolutely no emotion in his face.” She lowered the towel from her breasts toward her waist. “Turn around.”

I turned around, faced the wall as she dried some more of herself.

“Twenty minutes. That’s how long it took him to fill the hole. And he made sure I was packed in tight. At least at the shoulders. Didn’t even blink when I spit in his face. Do my back?”

“Sure.”

I turned around and she handed me the towel as she stepped out of the shower. I ran the thick terry cloth over her shoulders and then down along the muscles of her back as she twisted her hair in both hands and pulled it up against the back of her head.

“So, even though I was on this little shelf, there was still a good bit of dirt below me. And at first I couldn’t move, and I got terrified, but then I remembered what allowed me to stand on that rock with one foot for twenty minutes while Mr. Walking Dead buried me alive.”

“What was that?”

She turned in my arms. “You.” She slid her tongue over mine for a moment. “Us. You know. This.” She patted my chest and reached behind me, took the towel back. “And I moved around and twisted and more dirt fell below my feet and I kept squirming and, oh, three hours later, I started making some progress.”

She smiled and I kissed her, my lips meeting teeth, but I didn’t care.

“I was so scared,” she said, draping her arms across my shoulders.

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Wasn’t your fault. My fault for not picking up Lurch on my tail this morning while I tailed Desiree.”

We kissed and my hand planed through some beads of water I’d missed on her back and I wanted to pull her body so tight it would either disappear into mine or I’d disappear into hers.

“Where’s the bag?” she said when we finally broke the embrace.

I lifted it from the floor of the bathroom. Inside were her dirty clothes and the handkerchief we’d used to wipe her prints from the handles of the hoe and the garden shears. She tossed the towel in and I added the facecloth, and then she took a sweatshirt from the small pile of Desiree’s clothes I’d placed on the toilet seat and put it on. She followed that with a pair of jeans and socks and tennis shoes.

“Sneakers are a half size too big, but everything else fits fine,” she said. “Now let’s go deal with these mutants.”

I followed her out of the bathroom, trash bag in hand.

I pushed Trevor into the study as Angie went upstairs to check on Desiree.

We stopped by the front of the desk and he watched as I used another handkerchief to wipe down the sides of the chair where I’d been bound.

“Removing any trace of yourself from the house tonight,” he said. “Very interesting. Now why would you do that? And the dead valet—I assume he’s dead?”

“He’s dead.”

“How will he be explained?”

“I really don’t care. They won’t link us to it, though.”

“Wily,” he said. “That’s you all over, my young man.”

“Relentless, too,” I said. “Don’t forget why you hired us.”

“Oh, sure. But ‘wily’ has such a ring to it. Don’t you think?”

I leaned against the desk, hands crossed over my lap and looked down at him. “You do the wacky old coot imitation very well when it serves you, Trevor.”

He waved at the air with the third of his cigar that still remained. “We all need our bits of shtick to fall back on every now and then.”

I nodded. “It’s almost endearing.”

He smiled.

“But it’s not really.”

“No?”

I shook my head. “You have far too much blood on your hands for that.”

“We all have blood on our hands,” he said. “Do you remember some time back when it became fashionable to throw away Krugerrands and boycott all the products coming out of South Africa?”

“Of course.”

“People wanted to feel good about themselves. What’s a Krugerrand after all in the face of such an injustice as apartheid? Yes?”

I yawned into my fist.

“Yet at the same time that the beautiful, righteous American public boycotts South Africa or fur or whatever they’ll boycott or protest tomorrow, they turn a blind eye to the processes which provide them coffee from Central or South America, clothing from Indonesia or Manila, fruit from the Far East, just about any product imported from China.” He drew back on his cigar and stared through the smoke at me. “We know how these governments work, how they deal with dissent, how many employ slave labor, what they do to anyone who threatens their profitable arrangements with American companies. And we don’t just turn a blind eye, we actively encourage it. Because you want your soft shirts, you want your coffee, and your high-top sneakers and your canned fruit, and your sugar. And people like me get it for you. We prop up these governments and keep our labor costs low and pass the savings on to you.” He smiled. “And isn’t that good of us?”

I raised my good hand and brought it down on my thigh several times, made the exact noise I’d make clapping both hands together.

He held his smile and puffed his cigar.

But I kept clapping. I clapped until my thigh began to sting and the heel of my palm grew numb. I clapped and clapped, filling the big room with the sound of flesh hitting flesh until Trevor’s eyes lost their gaiety and his cigar hung from his hand and he said, “All right. You can stop now.”

But I kept clapping, my dead gaze fastened on his dead face.

“I said enough, young man.”

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

“Will you stop that annoying noise?”

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

He rose from his chair and I used my foot to push him back into it. I leaned in and increased the tempo and the force of my hand against my flesh. He closed his eyes tight. I clenched my fist and hammered it on the arm of his wheelchair, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, five beats per second, over and over. And Trevor’s eyelids clenched tighter.

“Bravo,” I said eventually. “You’re the Cicero of the robber barons, Trevor. Congratulations.”

He opened his eyes.

I leaned back on the desk. “I don’t care right now about the labor organizer’s daughter you chopped into pieces. I don’t care how many missionaries and nuns lay in shallow graves with bullets in the backs of their heads because of your orders or the politics you entrenched in your banana republics. I don’t even care that you bought your wife and probably made every moment of her life a living hell.”

“Then what do you care about, Mr. Kenzie?”

He raised the cigar to his lips and I slapped it off his face, let it smolder in the rug at my feet.

“I care about Jay Becker and Everett Hamlyn, you useless piece of shit.”

He blinked at the drops of sweat forming on his eyelashes. “Mr. Becker betrayed me.”

“Because to do otherwise would have been a mortal sin.”

“Mr. Hamlyn had decided to call several authorities and report my dealings with Mr. Kohl.”

“Because you destroyed a business it took him his entire life to build.”

He removed a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his dinner jacket and coughed heavily into it for a minute.

“I’m dying,” he said.

“No you’re not,” I said. “If you truly thought you were going to die, you wouldn’t have killed Jay. You wouldn’t have killed Everett. But if either of them hauled you into court, you couldn’t climb into your cryogenic chamber, could you? And by the time you were able, your brain would be gone, your organs completely shot, and freezing you would have been a waste of time.”

“I’m dying,” he repeated.

“Yeah,” I said, “now you are. And so what, Mr. Stone?”

“I have money. You name your price.”

I stood up and ground my heel on his cigar.

“My price is two billion dollars.”

“I only have one.”

“Oh, well,” I said and pushed him out of the study toward the stairs.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“Less than you deserve,” I said. “But more than you’re ready for.”

We climbed the grand staircase slowly, Trevor leaning on the railing and taking halting steps, his breathing labored.

“I heard you come in tonight and watched you walk across your study,” I said. “Your steps were a lot surer then.”

He gave me the tortured face of a martyr. “It comes in spurts,” he said. “The pain.”

“You and your daughter,” I said, “you never give up, do you?” I smiled and shook my head.

“To yield is to die, Mr. Kenzie. To bend is to break.”

“To err is human, to forgive is divine. We could keep going with this for hours. Come on. Your turn.”

He struggled up to the landing.

“Left,” I said and handed him back his walking stick.

“In the name of God,” he said. “What are you going to do with me?”

“At the end of the hall, take a right.”

The mansion was built so that its back faced east. Trevor’s study and his recreation room on the first floor looked out at the sea. On the second floor, the master bedroom and Desiree’s room did the same.

On the third floor, however, only one room faced the water. Its windows and walls could be removed, and in the summer a rail would be placed around the edges of the parquet floor, the slats in the ceiling removed to open up to the sky overhead, and hardwood squares fitted across the floor to protect the parquet. I’m quite sure it was no easy task to break this room down every sunny summer day, nor to put it back together and protect it from inclement weather at whatever time of night Trevor Stone chose to retire, but then, he didn’t have to worry about that. Lurch and the Weeble had to, I assumed, or whatever servants had been their servants.

In the winter, the room was laid out like a French drawing room with gilded Louis XIV chairs and chaises; delicate, embroidered settees and divans; fragile gold-encrusted tea tables; and paintings of bewigged noblemen and noblewomen discussing opera or the guillotine or whatever the French discussed in the numbered days of their doomed aristocracy.

“Vanity,” I said, looking at Desiree’s pulpy, broken nose and Trevor’s ruined lower face, “destroyed the French upper class. It triggered the revolution and sent Napoleon into Russia. Or so the Jesuits told me.” I glanced at Trevor. “Am I wrong?”

He shrugged. “A bit reductive, but it’s not far off.”

He and Desiree were tied to their chairs on either end of the room, each a good twenty-five yards from the other. Angie was off in the west wing of the first floor, gathering supplies.

Desiree said, “I’ll need a doctor for my nose.”

“We’re a little short on plastic surgeons at the moment.”

“Was it a bluff?” she said.

“Which?”

“About Danny Griffin.”

“Yeah. Total bluff.”

She blew at a strand of hair that had fallen in her face and nodded to herself.

Angie came back into the room and together we cleared all the furniture to the sides, left a wide-open swath of parquet between Desiree and her father.

“You measure the room?” I asked Angie.

“Absolutely. It’s exactly twenty-eight yards long.”

“I’m not sure I could throw a football twenty-eight yards. How far is Desiree’s chair from the wall?”

“Six feet.”

“Trevor’s?”

“The same.”

I looked at her hands. “Nice gloves.”

She held them up. “You like ’em? They’re Desiree’s.”

I held up my good hand, also gloved. “Trevor’s. Calfskin, I think. Very soft and supple.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out two pistols. One was an Austrian Glock 17 nine-millimeter. The other was a German Sig Sauer P226 nine-millimeter. The Glock was light and black. The Sig Sauer was silver aluminum alloy and slightly heavier.

“There were so many to choose from in the gun cabinet,” Angie said, “but these seemed the best for our purposes.”

“Clips?”

“The Sig holds fifteen. The Glock holds seventeen.”

“And one each in the chamber, of course.”

“Of course. But the chambers are empty.”

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Trevor said.

We ignored him.

“Who’s stronger, you think?” I said.

She looked at them both. “It’s a toss-up. Desiree’s young, but Trevor’s got a lot of strength in those hands.”

“You take the Glock.”

“Pleasure.” She handed me the Sig Sauer.

“Ready?” I said as I pressed the butt of the Sig Sauer in between my bad arm and my chest, worked the slide with my good hand, and jacked a round into the chamber.

She pointed the Glock at the floor and did the same. “Ready.”

“Wait!” Trevor screamed as I crossed the floor, the gun extended and pointing directly at his head.

Outside, the surf roared, and the stars burned.

“No!” Desiree screamed as Angie crossed the floor toward her, gun extended.

Trevor bucked against the ropes that bound him to the chair. He jerked his head left, then right, then left.

And I kept coming.

I could hear the hammering of Desiree’s chair on the parquet floor as she did the same, and the room seemed to shrink around Trevor as my footfalls grew closer. His face rose and expanded over the target sight; his eyes rocketed from side to side. Sweat poured from his hair and his ruined cheeks spasmed. His milky white lips curled back against his teeth and he howled.

I stepped up to his chair and put the gun against the tip of his nose.

“How’s it feel?”

“No,” he said. “Please.”

“I said, ‘How’s it feel?’” Angie yelled at Desiree from the other side of the room.

“Don’t!” Desiree screamed. “Don’t!”

I said, “I asked you a question, Trevor.”

“I—”

“How does it feel?”

His eyes darted on either side of the barrel as red veins erupted across the corneas.

“Answer me.”

His lips blubbered then clenched and the veins in his neck bulged.

“It feels,” he screamed, “like shit!”

“Yes, it does,” I said. “That’s how Everett Hamlyn felt when he died. Like shit. That’s how Jay Becker felt. That’s how your wife and a six-year-old girl you had cut up and thrown into a vat of coffee beans felt. Like shit, Trevor. Like nothing.”

“Don’t shoot me,” he said. “Please. Please.” And tears rolled from his vacant eyes.

I removed the gun. “I’m not going to shoot you, Trevor.”

As he watched in amazement, I dropped the magazine from the butt into my sling. I pressed the gun in against my injured wrist and worked the slide, ejected the live shell from the chamber. I bent and picked it up and placed it in my pocket.

Then as Trevor’s confusion grew, I pushed down on the slide lock and removed the slide from the top of the frame and dropped that into my sling. I reached into the frame and removed the spring above the barrel. I held it up for Trevor to see, then dropped it too into my sling. Lastly, I removed the barrel itself, added it to the other pieces.

“Five pieces,” I said to Trevor. “Total. The clip, the slide, the spring, the barrel, and the gun frame. I’m assuming you’re adept at field-stripping your weapons?”

He nodded.

I turned my head, called to Angie, “How’s Desiree with the field-stripping concept?”

“I believe Daddy taught her well.”

“Wonderful.” I turned back to Trevor. “As I’m sure you know, the Glock and the Sig Sauer are identical weapons in terms of field stripping.”

He nodded. “I’m aware of that.”

“Bitchin’.” I smiled and turned away from him. I counted off fifteen paces as I walked, stopped and removed the gun pieces from my sling. I placed them neatly on the floor, spaced out in a straight line.

Then I crossed the floor to Angie and Desiree. I stood at Desiree’s chair and turned back, counted off another fifteen paces from her chair. Angie came up beside me, and placed all five pieces of the disassembled Glock on the floor in a straight line.

We walked back to Desiree, and Angie untied her hands from the back of the chair, then bent and tightened the knots around her ankles.

Desiree looked up at me, choosing to breathe heavily through her mouth instead of her ruined nose.

“You’re crazy,” she said.

I nodded. “You want your father dead. Correct?”

She turned her face away from me, looked at the floor.

“Hey, Trevor,” I called. “You still want your daughter dead?”

“With every breath I have left,” he called.

I looked down at Desiree and she tilted her head, looked up at me through hooded lids and the honey hair that had fallen in her face.

“Here’s the situation, Desiree,” I said as Angie went and untied Trevor’s arms and checked the knots on his ankles. “You’re each bound at the ankles. Trevor a little less tightly than you, but not much. I figure he’s a little slower on his feet so I gave him a hair of an edge.” I pointed down the long, polished floor. “There are the guns. Get to them, assemble them, and do what you will with them.”

“You can’t do this,” she said.

“Desiree, ‘can’t’ is a conception of morality. You should know that. We
can
do whatever we put our minds to. You’re living proof.”

I walked to the center of the room, and Angie and I stood there, looking back at them as they flexed their hands and got ready.

“If either of you gets the bright idea to join forces and come after us,” Angie said, “we’ll be on our way to the
Boston Tribune
newsroom. So don’t waste your time. Whichever one of you lives through this—if either of you does—would be best served getting on a plane.” She nudged me. “Anything to add?”

I watched the two of them as they wiped their palms on their thighs, flexed their fingers some more, bent toward the ropes at their ankles. The genetic resemblance was obvious in their body movements, but it was deepest and most glaringly apparent in those jade eyes of theirs. What lived in there was greedy and recalcitrant and without shame. It was primordial and knew more about the stink of caves than the airy leisure of this room.

I shook my head.

“Have fun in hell,” Angie said and we walked out of the room and locked the doors behind us.

We headed straight down the servants’ stairwell and came out by a small door that led off one corner of the kitchen. Above us, something scratched the floor repeatedly. And then there was a thump, followed instantly by another from the other end.

We let ourselves out and followed the path along the back lawn as the sea grew still and quiet.

I took the keys I’d taken back from Desiree as we wound past the garden and the reconverted barn and stopped at my Porsche.

It was dark out, but there was a glow shining over the night from the stars above, and we stood by my car and looked up at it. Trevor Stone’s massive home shimmered in the glow, and I looked out at the flat swell of dark water to the place where it met the horizon and the sky.

“Look,” Angie said and pointed as a white asterisk of light shot across the dark sky, trailing embers, lunging toward a point beyond our view, but not making it. It shorted out two thirds of the way there and imploded into nothing as several stars around it seemed to watch without interest.

The wind that had been screaming off the ocean when I arrived had died. The night was impossibly still.

The first shot sounded like a firecracker.

The second sounded like communion.

We waited, but nothing replaced the gunshots but silence and the distant lapping of tired waves.

I opened Angie’s door and she climbed in, reached across, and pushed mine open as I came around.

We backed out and turned around, drove past the lighted fountain and the oak sentries, around the short minilawn with the frozen birdbath.

As the white gravel sucked under my grille, Angie produced a boxy remote control she’d taken from the house and pressed a button, and the great cast-iron gates with the family crest and the letters TS in the center parted like arms bidding us welcome or farewell, both gestures often seeming the same, depending on your perspective.