Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (120 page)

They went over and over the maps and drawings, studying the
entry point and approach, fighting sleep to acclimate themselves to the night
operation. She knew that eventually they would be in bed. That his hands would
be all over her and that she’d surrender to him. When it happened, she marveled
at the man’s ability to turn her aches and pains into something completely
opposite.

Afterward, as he was making a predawn check of the
perimeter, she lay on the bed feeling utterly fucked, looking forward to a good,
long sleep. On the way into that sleep, she went over everything that had
happened since Sunday.

She thought about the man whose face she broke with the
dumbbell and then shot, his body lying somewhere up in the woods, becoming a
feast for whatever creatures got to it first.

49

Ogden Thorp had a difficult time dealing with early guests
and party preparations until he finally got word from Rouse that their boy was
back. Rouse had him taken to the clinic owned by one of their golf and business
associates, Doc Winters.

One in the morning, Thorp finally heard from Rouse that
their boy was in the cabin and there was good news. “I’ll meet you in the gazebo
in ten minutes.”

In the gazebo on the water’s edge of Thorp’s estate, with
the work of setting up still going on behind him, Oggie drank scotch and paced
as he waited for Rouse to get out of his golf cart and join him. Just getting
Rouse to handle the situation when the guy returned had been a major deal. But
Oggie had been bogged down with the early arrivals and Rouse had to handle it.

“How’s he doing?”

Rouse went for a drink. “The doc said he had a zygomatic
fracture. They fixed him up with a mask like a goalie hockey mask. Makes him
look like a cross between Hannibal Lector and an alien.”

“Well, Kora’s okay, right?”

“Yeah. Sit. You’ll need to sit.”

“None of your drama routines. Just tell me what he found
out. Why was she with them? What happened?

Thorp saw in Rouse’s face that it was something. “Well,
damnit?”

Rouse smiled. He was waiting for this moment. “They’re dead.
They had Kora, threatening her. Wanted her to lure you out, and she wasn’t
cooperating. He showed up, killed them both. Kora’s right on the water. They
took the bodies down to her boat in the middle of the night, wrapped up in
blankets. He anchored them with wire and the Kettle balls that Kora works out
with. They’re at the bottom of the lake swimming, as the Italians like to say,
with the fishes.”

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious.”

Thorp was dumbstruck for a moment as he looked out at the
lake. “Pour me another. Hallelujah. That calls for a toast. Nobody saw them?”

“Not that we’ve heard.”

Finally, Thorp thought. Finally that bitch is gone.

“Our boy is something else,” Thorp said. “He goes over there
with his goddamn face broken and does the job. Jesus, that’s a real soldier.”

They toasted to their boy.

“I worry,” Rouse said. “He’s killed four people. That’s a
lot of dead. They haven’t even found Corbin. Maybe we should send somebody over
to get rid of the body.”

“Cillo’s was an accident. Corbin committed suicide or
something. Who cares? Don’t go anywhere near that. And Cruz ran off to places
unknown with his new girlfriend. Don’t worry so damn much. We own the right
people and means, we get to decide what the truth is. And that, my friend, being
a lawyer, you should know is the greatest power of all.”

They clinked glasses. Behind them, the party crews below
were putting up the finishing touches for the big striped tents, outdoor dance
floor, stage, and the movie screen behind the stage that would play, silently,
over and over all night, the movie version of
The Great Gatsby
.

Thorp was buoyant, thrilled, in love with his hired gun.
Getting rid of Jesup was a big relief, a huge weight off of him. He couldn’t
wait to see Kora and find out the details of what those bastards had wanted her
to do.

***

Friday night, when the festivities got underway, Thorp was
in for another surprise.

“She’s at the Cal-Neva,” Rouse said, coming out on the
veranda. “She’s coming over in a limo with, she says, the mystery guest.”

“What?”

***

From the moment they exited the limo, Kora and her masked
mystery guest were something of a sensation. Kora, decked out in her white Daisy
outfit, Leon in a black suit, black mask, perfect beside her. Thorp and Rouse
met and escorted them up to his office, its deck overlooking the party and the
lake.

They listened, enraptured, as Kora told them told them this
wild story about how Corbin was blackmailing her and how she was kidnapped by
Jesup and Marco Cruz and how they were going to use her to get to them and kill
him.

“If Leon hadn’t shown up when he did, killed them both, you
might be the ones dead.”

Kora seemed very different in some way. Beautiful and bold
as he’d never seen her. And brilliant.

Touching Leon’s arm, she said, “You need to offer a big
prize for anyone who can guess who he is. Not that they will, but it’ll be a lot
of fun. Offer half a million or something. It’ll be really cool.”

It took a bit for Thorp to buy into it, but Kora proved
right. Friday night was a winner all around. And it was just the opening act.
The warm-up as people continued to stream in from Hollywood, Vegas, Silicon
Valley, Texas.

The whole mystery-guest thing got bigger and bigger. Word
went around of the half million to the winner. People came up to Thorp with
their guesses. Saturday, it grew until the mystery guest was almost the
centerpiece of the event.

And the pro played it to the hilt. He seemed to love the
whole thing.

Rouse, as usual, wasn’t happy, especially when he learned
from Kora that the pro decided he might take Thorp up on the idea of becoming a
permanent part of the new world Thorp and his investors were planning. Rouse
looked petrified at the idea. They watched as Leon walked among the guests.

“He’s great,” Kora said. “He’ll be a great addition. He can
run all the security operations. And deal with problems.”

“Why don’t we just make him a
Tonka
overseer to
senior management,” Rouse said with disgust.

Thorp and Kora both laughed.

The band was in full throat. Servers in their elegant
outfits were carrying trays of drinks. The lakefront, gazebo, and dance floor
festooned with lights.

Thorp said, “Daisy, this mystery guest is genius. It’ll be
talked about and guessed at for years because we’ll never reveal who he is.
Hell, I even had one drunk woman suggest it was Obama with his skin deliberately
whitened for the occasion.”

Rouse, not amused, left, heading for the poker room. Kora
watched him go. “Well, that’ll probably be the last we see him until Sunday
afternoon.”

Thorp put his arm around Kora and escorted her into the
crowd, calling people
old sport
and acting like he was king of the
universe.

Enjoy it,
Kora thought,
it won’t last all that
long.
Thorp, thinking he had the world in the palm of his hand, King of the
Sierras on his throne, had no idea what was going on. He was in for a big shock.

He loved to brag how his ancestors had cleared the Indians
from this land, housed and fed gold seekers, hung a few, brought Chinese coolies
to help build the railroads. This was his land, his heritage.

Not for much longer, asshole,
Kora thought, as she
smiled at admiring guests. Somebody was insisting it was Brad Pitt.

“He’s better looking and more available than Brad,” Kora
said, drawing laughter.

Kora needed to break free and go text Marco Cruz, so she
whispered to Thorp she needed to take a pee, and then kissed him on the ear,
thinking that would be a nice place to put a bullet.

She needed to know if they had anyone else on the inside. If
they did, explaining the mystery guest might be a problem. She hadn’t thought
about that.

But when she contacted Jesup and Cruz, it seemed she was
their only inside girl. “So far, so good,” Kora told Leon when she met him out
by the gazebo.

50

The communication with Kora had gone well. Her head, as
Marco had predicted, was very much in the game. They learned from Kora that the
party was a huge success. So far, Kora knew nothing about what happened to the
guy who’d killed Corbin.

Sydney kept tabs through her police-reporter friend on what
was going on, and Corbin’s body hadn’t yet been found. He apparently had no
friends coming over to see what he was up to.

Saturday night, Sydney, feeling the butterflies of excited
tension, helped Marco get everything into the boat they would need. Marco had
two escape plans in case everything went to hell. Sydney didn’t want to get into
negative thinking, so she left that up to him. In her mind, if something went
wrong, escape might be all but impossible given the security Thorp had roaming
around his estate. Fortunately, they weren’t going anywhere near his party or
his grounds.

It had been a week since the incident at the hatchery and
for the first time, Sydney felt good physically. The wounds had enjoyed a few
days without further trauma and were beginning to heal nicely.

That night, they ate a good meal, rested, then left in the
boat at two in the morning. It was warm. A balmy, beautiful night on the empty,
vast waters of the lake. They were both dressed in black, camouflage under their
eyes, ball caps. Marco carried Dutch’s equipment. She brought Kora’s tapes and
pics in a shoulder bag along with nylon rope, cutters, backup batteries.

Sydney drove the boat toward Brockway, leaving Tahoe City
behind to the west, then past Carnelian Bay and Kings beach on the eastern side
of the lake, where they crossed that invisible line that separated California
and Nevada. They approached Incline east of the Cal Neva Highlands and entered
Crystal Bay without encountering any other craft on the lake, since it was so
late at night.

The denizens of Incline, usually in total darkness at night
from any distance out on the lake, had a brightness this night. One big splash
of colorful Christmas-style lights ringed the Thorp estate.

“I’ve been dreaming about this night for a long time,”
Sydney said.

“Let’s hope it’s a dream come true,” Marco said. “This
equipment works, Kora keeps it together, the lawyer doesn’t check his place
every fifteen minutes, we’ll get into the house. Then, of course, we need to get
into the office and then, if the safe is too much, we’re going to need some
help.”

They discussed this possibility and decided at that point,
Kora was going to have to find a way to bring Rouse over. They hoped that wasn’t
necessary.

The closer they came, the more they could make out the
lanterns and colored strings of lights. The band had a giant movie screen behind
it. The tents and outdoor dance floor swarmed with what looked like hundreds of
people having a riotous time.

Marco trained the night glasses on the party. “It’s in high
gear,” he said. “Won’t be many sober folks around.”

“If they get their way,” she said, “that’s what the whole
lake will look like every night. The Vegas Strip wrapped around from one end to
the other like a big neon necklace. Okay in the desert maybe, but not here.”

She then drove the boat past Thorp’s and Rouse’s, turned,
and moved in toward shore at Incline beach. They came in quiet as a shark
slicing across the calm water, the boat engine’s hum silenced by the background
big-band noise. Two hundred yards out, she slowed and took the binoculars. The
party was in full throat, the guests in their Roaring ‘20s finest.

“I never get invited to these kinds of parties,” Marco said.
“I bet you don’t either.”

“My invitations always get lost in the mail.”

The grounds were swarming with Mexican frijoleros in their
waiter outfits. The ladies in their flapper dresses and hats out on the open-air
dance floor, Lindy hopping all over the place.

“But look at the bright side—we’re both invited to this
one,” Sydney said.

As they drew closer, they could see the big screen behind
the band stage, the movie showing Nick Carraway losing his hat from the boat.
The beginning? She couldn’t remember but thought so. The movie probably played
nonstop, over and over. No way, if there was sound, anybody could hear anything
with that big band.

The boat bobbing gently in the water, Sydney sent a text to
Kora North and waited for her reply. With the party lights sucking up
visibility, and dark mountains behind them, they were virtually invisible to
anyone farther than fifty yards away. Rouse’s estate was dark except for
ground-level Malibu lights along the walkways through his gardens.

“C’mon, Kora, respond,” Sydney said anxiously.

Finally, they got the text they were waiting for. Kora was
ready per the plan. She had Rouse under close surveillance with the help of two
girls who were working the gaming.

51

Kora went back outside after her last text. She found Leon
in the middle of a small group trying to guess his identity. The reward was now
rumored to be a cool million dollars.

Thorp, all decked out in a white suit exactly as Redford,
came over to Kora. “The fountain swim is in about an hour. Get the girls
together. This will be the icing on the cake.”

“We’ll be ready,” Kora said. Somebody called Thorp, and he
went off to join some of his big investors.

Kora smiled when Leon came over to her followed by a couple
of drunk girls all leggy and excited, dancing on the grass, shaking their
booties, each with a colorful headband. Part of the
girls-gone-wild-naked-in-the-fountain routine to cap off the party.