The two groups split into several smaller ones and piled into four or five cars and trucks, which went screeching out onto the main street. Cold but alert, Jake lay on the roof until he was sure everyone who’d been gathered in the parking lot had left. Something banged against a ventilator pipe and he nearly jumped over the edge, but it was only a pair of disturbed pigeons rearranging themselves in their nest.
Half an hour passed before he felt secure enough to retrace his path down the fire ladder, along the ledge, and back into his empty room.
At first he couldn’t tell if anyone had come looking for him there. The front door was still locked, the safety chain still in place. The door leading to room 224, however, stood slightly ajar. A quick glance revealed a broken lock. They had thought to check the adjoining room, then. Carefully he pulled the door aside and stepped through.
It was dark and there was a peculiar smell he didn’t recognize. He turned on the bathroom light, hoping it wouldn’t be visible from the parking lot.
The first thing he saw clearly was the face of the young woman who’d offered him the ride. She was lying half on, half off the bed. Her head brushed the floor and she was staring at something unseen. One leg showed bare atop the bed and one arm lay limply on the floor like a pale snake. A steady drip, drip came from somewhere Jake was glad he couldn’t see. The blood ran down her arm and pooled on the carpet, explaining both sound and smell.
Her husband lay on the floor nearby, nude and intertwined with the fully clad body of a man Jake didn’t recognize. The stranger’s head lolled at an unnatural angle. The young husband was bleeding from the back. Jake could see the knife wounds: straight, clean, ugly where the flesh was cleaved. He stood there with his mouth trembling and tried to make some sense of what he saw. After everything that had happened this past week, after all the attempts that had been made to capture him, he finally began to realize the extent to which Huddy and his people would go to get him back.
And that made less sense than anything else.
No witnesses. They didn’t want any witnesses, he thought numbly. Either that or when they hadn’t found him in the room, they’d panicked. Obviously the young man had put up an unexpectedly strong resistance. Fat lot of good it had done him.
Nice folks, those two kids. He backed slowly out of the room. They’d made one bad mistake in their young lives. They’d given him a ride. My fault, he thought. This is my fault. I shouldn’t have stayed close to them, shouldn’t have involved anyone. I shouldn’t….
Something screamed in his brain. It was distant, yet near. Far off, yet proximate.
Amanda!
She wasn’t talking at him as she usually did. She was broadcasting her distress blindly. Someone, there was someone in her room, not her mother, not her father. Someone who’d entered through the window that overlooked the bay, a window that Jake knew well even though he hadn’t seen it in years.
He stumbled backward and fell into the dressing table. A lamp went flying, crashed to splinters against a wall. He spun around in the darkness holding his head, which throbbed and pulsed like an overheated engine.
Amanda, Amanda! She couldn’t reply. He had the feeling she was trying to scream aloud. That first shout had been a silent one, an instinctive reaction to whatever menaced her. Now she was trying to alarm her parents, to wake them, to summon help … and she couldn’t. She couldn’t because she was being gagged. Something was shutting off her breath and she couldn’t make any noise. Not in her room, but she could still howl with her mind. Only one human being could hear those screams, and he was hundreds of miles from aiding her.
He could feel the gag filling her mouth, could see dark forms moving around her. Then even that was taken from him as something was pressed and bound over her eyes. She was being lifted and carried, trying to fight with her arms, unable to resist with her useless legs. The wheelchair was left behind, then the bedroom itself.
Jake slumped to the carpet, fell back against the bed, then found himself prone on the floor. Slowly he brought his trembling fingers away from his head. The throbbing was fading, receding.
Amanda was gone.
Just … gone. It was not at all like when she ended their private conversations, nothing like that. At such times she left him gently, smoothly. This time her mental self had been terminated with brutal suddenness.
He lay there with his legs bent, staring at nothing. He couldn’t tell if Amanda was asleep or drugged or dead. Only that she was unconscious.
Someone had grown impatient. Someone had decided it was time to stop toying with their quarry. Time to employ real leverage, time to get serious. So they’d taken Amanda away.
He fumbled at his shirt pocket. Shakily he pulled out the little bottle and threw three of the pills down his throat. It was bad when he had to use three. Not desperately bad, but bad enough to frighten him. The pounding beneath his ribs slowed; the fire fled from his chest.
Get out of this town, a voice inside his head ordered him. You can’t stay here. They’re bound to come back and check again. And if they don’t, there are two corpses in the room next to yours. If the police pick you up, Huddy will find some way of taking you off their hands. You know that.
No Amanda to help him anymore. No brilliant grandniece to add intelligence to his common sense. He was on his own.
He used the back window again even though the parking lot showed no sign of activity. The ladder led him to the ground.
Mandy, he thought, what have they done with you, Mandy? He was almost crying. He hadn’t cried in a long time, in spite of the fact that old men are commonly prone to such displays. But not Jake Pickett. Not until now. Fear and worry combined to push him close to the emotional edge.
At the far end of the motel he hesitated as he checked out the pavement. Early morning/late night traffic was sparse but present. Surely with cars zipping back and forth no one would try to kidnap him off the curb. In any case, he didn’t know what else to do. He was confused and panicky, for Amanda more than himself.
The bus stations would be full of Huddy’s minions now. They’d never let him on another cross-country bus. He started out across the asphalt, trying to cling to the shadows as much as possible. Then he was standing on the curb beneath a streetlight, thumb extended, holding the collar of his jacket tightly against his neck.
There was an all-night gas station nearby and he started walking toward it. The light was better there and a curious attendant noticed him immediately. It felt good to have someone watching him as he stood there by the curb, hoping desperately for a ride.
“That’s him.” The woman turned to her companion and handed over the binoculars. The man pushed back his hat and leaned on the hood of the car as he stared down the street, swearing with unnecessary violence at any cars which passed between him and the object of his attention.
“Yeah, it’s him alright.” He reached through the open door of the car and pulled out the business end of the CB. “Masterson, this is checkpoint two, repeat, checkpoint two. Come back, Masterson.”
A voice crackled back at him. “What’ve you got, Stroud?”
“The old man’s standing in front of a Whiting Bros, station, trying to hitch a ride. I don’t know where he was hid out, but it’s him for sure. You want us to move in and pick him up?”
“You don’t just pick this old man up,” said the voice. “Where is he? Out on First Street?”
“Yeah. Hell, there’s not enough traffic to make it risky. We can take him.”
“It only takes one bystander who wants to play hero to mess things up, Stroud. Like those jerks in the motel. Besides, we handle this guy real easy, remember?”
“Shee-it, Masterson, somebody else going to get the glory for our work?”
“Alicia, you there?”
The woman took the CB unit from her companion, glared at him. He made a face, turned to look back through the binoculars.
“Masterson, Alicia here. We’ll do what you say, but I for one don’t buy any of the crap Houston handed us about this old boy. He’s standing out there freezing his ass off just like anybody else.”
“Just follow your orders, Alicia. Keep him in sight. I’m sending a pick-up team back after him right now. They’ll be there in five minutes. They’ll pull into the station, make like they’re buying gas, and then they’ll take him. You’ll get your money, don’t worry.”
