Twenty-three
Standing at the braced door, Henry waited for the knob to turn again, but it did not.
The hollow-core doors of the bedroom closet and the bathroom had offered little resistance to a blast of buckshot. Had anyone lurked on the other side, he would have been grievously wounded.
This cellar door, however, was a solid oak slab, hard enough and thick enough to stand up to the 20-gauge. There might even be some ricochets, which Henry chose not to risk.
Whoever stood on the landing at the head of the cellar stairs must be listening, as Henry listened. For a minute or so, neither of them gave the other anything to hear.
The mediocre wine had left a less than mediocre aftertaste. Now Henry’s mouth soured further. His lips were dry under the nervous passage of his dry tongue.
Beyond the door, the tormentor at last spoke in a rough whisper. “Henry?”
Low and hoarse, the voice could have been that of anyone. It had no recognizable character.
“Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry.”
Three of those four repetitions were slurred, as though the tormentor had a malformed—or damaged—mouth.
Henry didn’t know anyone with a speech impediment. The man beyond the door could be no one he knew. No one.
Because his adversary might be well-armed, Henry didn’t speak or otherwise make a sound that might reveal his presence and position.
Among the weapons packed in his Land Rover was an Urban Sniper, a pistol-grip shotgun that fired only slugs powerful enough to stop a charging bull. If the tormentor had armed himself with the Sniper, the oak wouldn’t provide sufficient protection for Henry.
From the farther side of the door came a shuffling as the intruder turned around on the landing. Heavy footsteps descended into the cellar, faded into silence.
Quietly, Henry returned to the dinette table. He put down the shotgun but remained standing. Although the wine wasn’t worthy of him, he drained his glass and poured another serving.
He expected to hear noises below, but silence endured.
If the tormentor had seen Henry carry two heavy suitcases into the house, and if he was someone who knew what might be in those bags, perhaps he already found them.
Henry waited to hear the outer cellar door opening and the rain doors being swung out and back from the exterior stairs. Nothing.
After a while, he sat at the table.
If the tormentor had somehow left quietly with the two million dollars, that would be a blow but not a disaster. Henry had with him five million in cut diamonds, another ten million in bearer bonds. In safe-deposit boxes in domestic and foreign institutions, he kept fortunes in commodities-grade gold coins, also in rare coins of greater value than their precious-metal content.
In the circles in which Henry once moved, embezzlement had such a long history that some viewed it as an honorable tradition. The sums drained from the system in the past, however, were pittances compared to the fortunes gushing from the spigots in recent years.
Those who stole billions were whales, and schools of them plied the waters, majestic superthieves to whom pilferers like Henry were mere pilot fish. He had assumed that the thirty million he filtered out of the flow would not be missed.
Now he wondered if he might be wrong to think that a small fish could swim safely among leviathans. Perhaps the whales devoured small fish as readily as they ate krill or plankton.
The climber and descender of the stairs wanted Henry to search the cellar. The subsequent silence was meant to wear his restraint to a fragile filament.
He was being baited. He would not take the hook.
Neither would he go outside at night to check on the remaining contents of the Land Rover. Dawn would be soon enough.
The thought of dawn led him to consider how his situation might deteriorate if his enemy cut power during the night. He didn’t want to be feeling his way through a strange house in absolute blackness.
When the University of Colorado had used this place for forest-management research, it paid to have the power company trench the dirt lane and bury cable. But the line must come out of the ground before entering the house, which was a point of vulnerability.
In the cellar, he’d seen a service panel. If his tormentor was still down there and decided to flip a few breakers, Henry would be effectively blind.
He imagined groping warily through lightless rooms and hearing, close at his side, a low, rough voice whisper Henry.
Anxiety spiking, he searched kitchen cabinets and drawers until he found a flashlight and spare batteries. All right. He would be all right.
Now, at a few minutes past ten o’clock, dawn lay at least eight hours away. If he spent the night alert for sounds of an attempted break-in, he would be exhausted by daybreak. Already weary, he needed sleep to regain the necessary edge to stay alive.
He wanted to leave all the lights on. But he had always needed darkness to sleep. If he switched off the lights in only one room, anyone outside would know where he must be sleeping.
After consideration, he switched off the kitchen fluorescents. In the dark, he saw a bright line at the bottom of the cellar door, which might mean either that his tormentor was down there or wanted him to think as much.
He left the lights on in the hallway but turned them off in the study where Nora had intended to prepare the sofa bed for him.
In the living room, he clicked off one lamp but left another aglow near a window.
He would sleep in the bedroom, but not where anyone would expect to find him. The situation required precautions, deception.
He propped the shotgun against the bedroom armchair. He put the flashlight and the package of batteries on a footstool.
In the closet with the riddled door, from a high shelf, Henry took down two extra pillows and two spare blankets. With these, he could create the illusion of a sleeper, under the covers.
Approaching the bed, he saw the gloves.
The pillows and blankets fell from his arms.
On the chenille spread lay the pair of leather work gloves that Jim had worn to chop wood. They hadn’t been there before. They were saturated with blood. The blood had leached into the chenille.