Words With Fiends (24 page)

And, more important, what was going to happen when he came back?

“He's going to find an empty room, that's what,” she said aloud with more determination than she really felt.

The light on her phone dimmed, leaving her in darkness once more. Hurriedly, she pressed the key again. Though the phone's glow did little to dispel the overall darkness, it still gave off a light substantial enough for her to see a couple of feet in front of her. Almost as good as a flashlight, she told herself, taking a bit of comfort in the illumination. She might not be able to call anyone, but at least she wouldn't be totally in the dark as long as she still had battery power.

Rallying, she got to her feet again.

First things first, she told herself. Just because there had been a light switch in the corridor didn't mean there wasn't a second switch inside the room. Mark wouldn't know she had her cell on her, and thus would be counting on her to be stymied by the dark. If she could shed some literal light on the subject, she'd have a better chance of figuring a way out of her trap.

Using her phone as a makeshift torch, she methodically scanned the area around the doorway. She didn't see another switch, just more metal conduits and panels. And her phone light bounced off any number of red or yellow signs bearing such warnings as
Danger
and
High Voltage
along with trusty pictorials of electrical bolts. Not the safest place to be wandering in the dark.

And then, beneath the constant electric hum, she heard something else behind her . . . a soft scrape, as if something was moving stealthily about near the generator.

She froze.
Watch out for the creepy crawlers,
Mark had snidely warned her. She had assumed the words were a juvenile attempt to frighten her, but maybe he hadn't been joking. Rats, giant cockroaches, snakes . . . ghosts. She shivered a little at that last possibility, though the other three were distinctly unpleasant, too.

Steeling herself, she whipped about and pointed her phone in the direction of the sound, using its light to search the shadows. Too high, she realized and lowered her arm. And then she gasped when a pair of unblinking green eyes reflected back at her.

“Hamlet?”

The cat gave a little
meowrmph
by way of answer and trotted to her. With a cry of relief, Darla dropped to her knees and gathered him in her arms, laughing a little as she heard his rumble of a purr.

“You little so-and-so, why did you run off like that?” she scolded him. “Oh, never mind, I'm sure you had a reason, but now I'm the one in trouble. I was stupid enough to think that our creepoid friend Mark Poole was trying to help me find you. Instead, he's pulling some sort of
Silence of the Lambs
thing on me, locking me in here in the dark. We've got to get out of here, before he comes back.”

Hamlet gave a sharp
meow
and struggled free of her grasp. But instead of running off again, he gave another
meow
, this one even more insistent, and then trotted a few steps into the shadows.

“What, you want me to follow you?” Suddenly, Darla realized that if Hamlet was in the electrical room with her, there was obviously another way out besides the now-locked door by which she'd entered. Mark had talked about a second door. Maybe he hadn't been lying about that part.

“All right, let's go,” she urged the cat. “I'm right behind you.”

Hamlet took off at a trot again, his sleek black fur blending so closely with the shadows that she could barely make him out. He whipped around the generator, and Darla did the same, hoping there were no low-lying pipes to conk her in the head. The room was far larger than she'd initially guessed. In fact, as she made her way farther in, she could see a shadowed area to her left that appeared to be a connecting room.

And in front of her lay the Holy Grail: a reflective sign marked
Exit
attached to another door.

“Thank goodness,” she whooshed out and rushed toward it. Now, she could hear the cheers drifting from the tournament floor again, sounding muffled but definitely nearby. Maybe she
was
under the bleachers, after all! But, of course, when she tried the doorknob it rattled uselessly under her grasp.

Locked.

Trying not to give in to despair, she held up her phone to get a better look. One difference she immediately noted was that this door was wood. Even better, the knob appeared to be a simple keyed style, and not a deadbolt as on the corridor door. She recalled how Hal had easily kicked open his father's office door a few days earlier. She might not be a black belt, but she had a mean front kick all the same. All she had to do was position herself properly and do the movie cop thing, and she'd be free.

“Stand back, Hamlet,” she told him, shining her makeshift flashlight around to make sure he wasn't somewhere he'd be stepped on.

To her surprise, she found him staring with cat-like intensity into the room beside them. His concentration on that opening gave her pause. Maybe somewhere in that space was where he'd found his way in, and he stubbornly wanted to exit the very same way.

“Okay, we'll try it your way,” she told him, “but I doubt someone my size could squeeze through wherever you found an opening.”

Raising the phone lantern-style again, she made her cautious way into the room. From what little she could see, the space had been designated as a storage area. Movable racks of folding chairs and stacks of collapsible tables had been stashed there, leaving a single narrow aisle along one side. At the end of the room, she could see light seeping in from a knee-high gap.

Maybe this was what she'd seen when she had first tried to crawl under the bleachers, she realized as she headed toward the light.

Hamlet had padded into the room along with her. Now, she almost tripped over him as he halted right in front of her and started sniffing one of the chair racks.

“No time for that, Hamlet,” she sternly told him. “We need to get out of here before Mark comes back with lotion or something.”

But when she bent to pick him up, he hissed. Then, to Darla's even greater surprise, he began pawing at the metal tubing as if trying to move the rack. Something back there had piqued his feline interest, and he wasn't leaving until he got a better look at it. Sighing, she shoved her phone back into her waistband.

“Fine, you've got two seconds. If there's a rat back there, you're going to be in my bad book even though you did rescue me. Now, scoot, and let me see what you've found.”

Though the rack was heavy, she was able to roll it a few feet, enough so that she'd be able to see behind it. Steeling herself for mouse guts or giant leaping spiders, Darla gingerly leaned forward to take a look.

The first thing she spied, however, was a leopard-print pump. Puzzled, she leaned closer. And then, with a reflexive shriek, she jumped back.

For the leopard-print pump was connected to a woman's long, pale leg . . . a leg that belonged to none other than Grace Valentine.

NOT ANOTHER ONE,
WAS DARLA'S FIRST FRANTIC THOUGHT.

Try as she might, however, she couldn't pull her gaze away from the leopard-print shoe, and the woman attached to it.

Grace lay on her side, knees slightly bent, as if she'd simply settled down for a quick nap. Save for her flashy heels, the outfit was—for Grace—almost conservative. In the low light, Darla could see she was wearing a tight black leather skirt topped by a ruffled white blouse that had come untucked on one side. How the woman had come to be hidden behind a stack of metal chairs, Darla could not guess.

All she knew was that it was no accident.

Then she shuddered. Maybe Mark had pulled his
Silence of the Lambs
routine on Grace, too . . . except that Grace hadn't managed to get away before the final scene. And this must have been what Mark had feared that Darla had seen while searching under the bleachers.

Yeee-ow!

Hamlet's sudden, ear-raking cry was like a dash of water to her face. Darla shook herself. What if Grace was simply unconscious? Why was she staring down at the woman as if she were nothing more than a mannequin, instead of trying to help her?

“Grace!” Seizing the chair rack again, Darla yanked the heavy fixture back so that there was room now for her to squeeze behind it. “Grace!” she cried again, dropping to her knees beside the woman and shaking her by the shoulder. “It's me, Darla. Can you hear me?”

When she got no response, Darla carefully rolled the woman onto her back and laid her ear against Grace's ruffled bust. Her chest didn't seem to be moving, but Darla thought she heard a faint heartbeat. Grace was alive, but perhaps just barely.

Snatching her phone from her waistband again, Darla jumped to her feet and pressed the “On” button. The battery icon had dropped to just a sliver, she saw in dismay. But maybe now, away from the electrical interference, she could get a signal and make a final call. She held her breath and waited. And then, three full bars appeared on the tiny screen.

Almost sobbing in relief, she hit redial. She heard the sound of the call connecting, and then heard the words she'd been praying for.

“Where in the hell are you, Red?” Reese demanded over the echoing sound of the cheering spectators. “I just got this crazy text, and—”

“I'm here,” she cut him short, half-yelling so that he could be sure to hear her. “I'm somewhere behind the bleachers near where we were sitting, I think. Quick, call an ambulance!”

“An ambulance?” The outraged tone became clipped, professional. “What's wrong? Are you hurt?”

“Not me, Grace Valentine. Hamlet and I found her. I'm not sure what happened, but she's in pretty bad shape.”

She heard a quick, muffled conversation on his end, and then he was back on the line almost instantly. “Ambulance is being called, and we've got a doctor—hell, two or three of them—in the house. Can you find your way back to the floor so you can guide us to where she is?”

“Yes . . . I mean, I guess so, but I don't know if I should leave her. She's not breathing right.”

“Then stay on the line and try to guide us your way.”

“Okay, but I'm about to run out of—”

The call dropped, abruptly leaving her talking to herself.

“Battery,” she finished in dismay, pulling the phone from her ear and watching its small screen go black. Apparently using the cell as a flashlight had drained the battery faster than she'd expected. Sticking the phone back in her waistband, she leaned over Grace again. The woman was looking even worse now.

“Help! 9-1-1!” Darla frantically screamed, hoping against hope that she might be heard over the din of the competition. If she'd been directly under the seats, chances were her plan would have worked. As it was, a wall separated her from the main gymnasium. With the crowd and the acoustics being what they were, it would be only by the purest chance if someone heard her cries.

She dropped to her knees again beside Grace. There wasn't time to wait on a doctor or an ambulance, wasn't even time to try to crawl her way out through the gap she'd seen a few minutes ago to find help. She had to start artificial respiration on the woman, and now, and pray that Reese found
her
.

“Can't . . . breathe.”

The words were so faint that Darla almost didn't hear them, but then she saw Grace stir, eyelids fluttering.

“Grace, it's Darla. What happened?” she demanded, clutching the woman's hand. “Where are you hurt?”

“Shot . . . me.”

“Someone shot you?” Darla asked in astonishment. Then, with a gasp, she added, “Do you mean Mark?”

Eyes still closed, Grace mouthed the word,
Yes
. Frantic, Darla searched the woman's body for a wound, but found nothing worse than dirt and grease marring the white blouse.

“Grace, are you sure? I don't see any blood. Where did he shoot you?”

Weakly, Grace raised a shaking hand, fingers clenched as if she held an invisible pencil. “Shot,” she whispered again and pressed her fingers to the crook of her opposite elbow before letting her arm fall onto her chest.

It took an instant for the pantomime to register. “Shot? You mean, he gave you a shot of something?”

Then realization dawned, and everything began to fall into place. Darla had heard and seen enough. Botox would explain why Grace couldn't breathe. The toxin would have paralyzed her chest muscles, just as it had with Master Tomlinson. The fact that Grace was still alive, when a much larger man had died, perhaps meant her dose had been far smaller. Maybe she still had a chance, but surely there was no time to spare. She didn't have time to worry about motives and explanations. For the moment, all that mattered was keeping Grace alive.

Swiftly, Darla tilted the woman's head back in preparation to start rescue breaths. But before she could begin, she heard a sound, like a footstep, directly behind her, and smelled a faint whiff of stale cigarette smoke. Barely had the import of that registered when something abruptly tightened like a noose around her throat.

Instinctively, she clutched at the narrow strip of thick cloth that was pressing into her flesh. Had she been standing, she could have tried the self-defense techniques she'd learned: stomp to the instep, elbow to the solar plexus, head into the nose. But in her crouched position, she was at a disadvantage. All she could attempt was the last one.

She whipped her head backward, praying that from that angle she could cause enough pain that she'd be released. But her attacker must have been expecting such a move, for she instead hit something hard that she assumed must have been a shoulder. The blow made her head spin, and she sagged toward the floor, her fingers loosening their grip on the karate belt around her throat.

“You're not very good at this, are you, Darla?”

Mark Poole sniggered as he tightened the loop just enough to keep her from sliding farther. “I mean, you were smart to figure out how to get out of that room in the dark, but you're pretty bad at self-defense. Now stand up and make yourself useful, unless you want to end up like Master Tomlinson, hanging from a hook somewhere.”

The mocking words stirred her to action. Gasping, Darla dizzily got to her feet, still clutching at the belt as he dragged her backward and out of the gap behind the chair rack. As long as she didn't struggle, she could suck in enough air to keep breathing. But keeping still meant that she was pressed into Mark's bony form in a disgustingly intimate fashion.

When I get loose,
she frantically vowed,
this creepoid is going to need surgery to reattach his man parts!
But first, she needed to talk him down.

“Mark,” she gasped out, “let me go. I need to help Grace. She's still alive.”

“Not for long. I think I'll hang her, too, just like they did with Tess in that stupid book.”

The nasal voice was harsh and excited as he pulled the belt fractionally tighter around Darla's throat, so that she clawed at it again. “She deserves to be punished. I took care of her boyfriend, first. Now it's her turn. Don't mess this up for me, Darla.”

“I-I'm not. Seriously, y-you're really hurting me,” she managed. “Let me go so we can talk about this.”

“Talk, talk, talk,”
he echoed in the now familiar mocking falsetto, though to her relief he loosened the belt again. “You women, you think you can get away with anything you want, just because you're females. Well, I'm tired of your crap! Hers, too,” he added, and scuttled forward to give the unconscious woman a vicious kick in the side.

Darla gave a cry of protest that was abruptly cut off when Mark yanked on the belt.

“I should have done that to her when I found out she was pregnant,” he told Darla, his words coming in ragged gasps now. “She was supposed to be
my
girlfriend, and then she went and got herself knocked up by . . . by
him.
And I was all nice about it. I told her I forgave her, and that I'd even marry her, but she just laughed at me and went off and had the kid on her own. She was a slut, just like Tess. But I'm no Angel.”

“So you killed Master Tomlinson and tried to frame Grace for his murder?” Darla choked out while desperately wondering why in the hell Reese hadn't yet torn the bleachers apart to find her.

She felt rather than saw Mark's nod.

“I figured they'd think she killed him, but the stupid cops never arrested her, not even after I shredded her class registration and left it in the trash for them to find. Since that didn't work, I left that picture in the file drawer for them to find, and they still never went after her. And then she attacked me in class”—his voice now held a note of injured surprise—“and all they did was put her in handcuffs. So it's all up to me now. I have to execute her myself if the police won't.”

Darla was stunned.
Execute her?
The man wasn't just off his meds; he was a whole other country away from them! She'd seen for herself that the book club discussion about
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
had put him into a small frenzy. From what Mark was saying, it seemed he'd known Grace before she'd gotten pregnant with Chris, and had had the idea back then that he and Grace were an item . . . more likely on par with how he'd seemingly decided that
Darla
was his good friend simply because she'd unwittingly been playing word games with him in cyberspace. Whatever the situation, it seemed that his literary revenge fantasy had spun out of control.

“Mark,” she managed, deciding to humor him, “I don't blame you for being angry, but there are better ways to get back at Grace than this.”

“Like what?” he demanded, while from the tournament floor Darla heard a sudden distant cheer from the spectators. Frantically, she struggled to propose an alternative to murder that would satisfy the man, but drew a blank. Mark, meanwhile, abruptly loosened the belt from around her neck and gave her a shove in Grace's direction.

“Yeah, I didn't think you could come up with anything.”

Rubbing her throat, she whipped about to face him. He was twisting the belt he'd been choking her with in his hands now. With a shock of recognition she saw in the dim light the five red stripes and tiny embroidered dragon at one end. This, then, was what had happened to the sensei's missing black belt . . . and, as much as any confession, its presence tied Mark to that murder.

The man noticed the direction of her gaze, and he gave a nervous smile.

“Yeah, this makes it all perfect,” he declared, giving the belt another twist. “I've got a great plan for this belt, but we've got to hurry. Now, grab Grace and drag her up onto her feet.”

Darla hesitated, recalling Master Tomlinson's credo.

Run when you can.

Mark was still blocking her way, but at least now she had some room to move. Assuming, of course, that he hadn't locked the main door after him. If she could fight her way past him and reach the electrical room again, she might be able to escape that way. Or, she could finally try for the gap underneath the bleachers. If she moved fast enough, she might be able to squeeze her way out onto the competition floor. But could she pull that off?

Mark must have seen the fleeting indecision in her face. He gave an exaggerated sigh and looped Master Tomlinson's belt like a scarf over his neck before reaching inside his gi jacket.

“I didn't want to have to do this, but since you're not cooperating, I don't have a choice,” he said, and pulled out a plastic cylinder from which protruded a short, pointed orange cap.

He popped off the cap, and Darla caught her breath as light momentarily glinted from the shining needle he'd exposed. As syringes went, this one wasn't very large. But she could see that the plunger was pulled back on it, meaning it was partially filled. And she had no doubt as to what was in it.

“You know, I always did like you, Darla,” he told her. “I thought maybe we could go out on a date or something. We had lots of fun playing word games together. But I don't think you like me that way, after all. So here's the deal. You do what I say, or I'm going to give you a little shot, just like I did Grace. I think I've got just enough left to do the job.”

She had no doubt that Mark meant what he'd just said. Slowly, Darla raised her hands in a gesture that was part surrender, part
let's slow down
. For the moment, her only option was to cooperate.

“All right, you're the boss,” she agreed, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I'll try to get Grace on her feet, but she's in pretty bad shape.”

“Then carry her,” he shot back, a trickle of sweat sliding from beneath the rising sun headband. “And hurry it up. I don't have all day to spend in here.”

Seeing no other choice, Darla knelt beside Grace again. Carefully, she pulled off the woman's spike-heeled pumps and put them to one side. Then she manually bent Grace's slim legs, one at a time, and slid each bare foot closer to the woman's body. When she was done, both the woman's knees now pointed skyward.