Eyes Wide Open

Chapter Sixty-Nine





I hung up and waited, sitting on the bed, my right leg bobbing crazily. I didn’t know what to do.

I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t afraid. The guy was stalking me. Mocking me, in the same way Houvnanian had. He was saying good-bye. My reasons for relocation here are coming to an end. What reasons? With Susan Pollack unaccounted for, it could only mean that whatever they had planned for Charlie and Gabby was going to happen soon.

I grabbed my phone again and punched in my brother’s number. I let it ring six or seven times—C’mon, Charlie, Gabby, pick up!—but no one answered. Finally the message recording came on. Gabby. “Please leave a number . . . We will get back to you.” Shit.

I didn’t know if they even checked these things.

“Listen, Charlie . . . ,” I blurted after the beep. “It’s Jay. I need to talk to you about what’s going on! It’s vitally important you call me back. Please . . .”

I hung up, not feeling good at all. Thirty seconds went by, and it felt to me like ten minutes. I must’ve glanced at my watch three times. They wanted me out. They wanted to face this alone. Something could already have happened! It was driving me crazy. I didn’t know what to do.

Only that, in that moment, I knew I couldn’t wait for Sherwood another second. I had to do something. Why wouldn’t they answer? It was possible, even likely, that while I sat there, something was going down right then.

I threw on my jeans and a shirt and grabbed my car keys off the desk. I opened the door and headed out, phone in hand. I figured I’d let Sherwood know what I was doing on the way.

I never saw a thing, only felt the impact of a two-handed swing from the side, as if a baseball bat had slammed into the side of my head.

I fell against the wall.

“Jeez, doc, where you headed so fast? You and I still have some things to talk about, no?”

The next blow struck me solidly in the face, the butt end of a large gun. I staggered backward through the half-closed door, attempting to catch my balance.

“You eastern folk . . .” The voice was like a faraway echo in my brain. “Always in such a big rush to go everywhere . . .”

The third shot almost knocked me down.

I was pushed back into my room, my head completely dazed, my legs rubber.

“Sorry, doc.”

He hit me in the stomach, sending me to a knee, and when I looked up, it was as if every bit of air had left my lungs and I heaved in desperation to draw a breath.

Dev was in the doorway. He let the door close tight behind him with a loud and very foreboding click.

This was bad.

Through my haze, Dev was grinning at me. “Maybe I’ll just take you up on that invitation a little earlier than you planned. That fine with you, doc?”

I could make out the gun in his hands, heavy and oversize, sending a tremor of fear shooting through me. My car keys were on the floor and he bent down and picked them up, catching them once in his palm. “I don’t know, I feel like we still have a few things to hash out. No reason to rush out now.”

I put a hand to my face. Warm blood streamed down the side. My brain was numb and clouded, but not so clouded that I didn’t realize I was in real trouble here. I flashed to Zorn and Greenway. And that woman from Michigan, her body all cut up. A chill shot through me. “What are you doing, Dev?”

“C’mon, Jay.” He laughed. “I may not have the fancy degree and all, but don’t play me for a complete fool.” He went over to the bed and picked up the copy of Greenway’s book I’d left there, opened to the photo of him on the tractor. “Man, I was a handsome bugger back then. A little lost, perhaps, but, hey, we all were. They called me Mal . . .” He tossed the book back on the bed and shook his head at me sympathetically. “Jeez, I couldn’t have laid it out for you any prettier, could I, Jay?”

I pushed up onto my feet and tried to run at him—all I could think to do—but he caught me on the side of the head with the gun butt, a blast ringing out this time and something thudding into the wall above the bed, creating a quarter-size hole.

I crumpled onto the floor, my head exploding.

“Damn, doc.” He chuckled, wide-eyed. “This thing really works. You know, it’s been a while.”

I flashed to Sherwood. He was on his way. “You don’t need to do this, Dev. I just called the police. They’ll be here any second.”

“The police . . .” He didn’t exactly seem worried. “If by ‘police’ you mean your ol’ buddy Sherwood . . . Hmmph, I’m afraid I have to inform you, doc . . . He’s just a shade under the weather at the moment.”

Sherwood. He was my only hope.

That’s when my fear really began to escalate. I knew now there was no one coming to the rescue. I was going to have to fight for my life.

Now.

I wasn’t a small guy. I’d played lacrosse in college. I kept in shape—forty-year-old shape. Like eighteen holes of golf or thirty minutes on the treadmill. Not fight-for-your-life kind of shape. Dev wasn’t exactly Rambo, but I knew the things he had done.

And my head was bursting.

“What are you going to do to me?” I asked, scanning around the room for something I could use.

“What am I gonna do? That’s a really good question, doc. One you probably should’ve worried about a little earlier in the game. Like when I asked you nicely to get back on that plane and go on home. Or before you had to visit Russell. Now it’s just a little late for asking me that, don’t you think? Now you’re, like, part of the music. Know what I mean?”

He stepped back, drawing the curtains closed. The room became dark and a chill shot through me.

My gaze swung to the night table and I grabbed a lamp there and lunged at him with everything I had.

It was a desperate act, and the electrical cord caught in the wall. Dev easily fended it off. With a backhanded swing, he drove the gun butt across my face and sent me reeling again, blood filling up my mouth.

Like an animal, he took the same lamp, yanking it free from the wall, and cracked it into the side of my head. I felt my eyes roll back. No, Jay, you can’t let him win. If you do, you’re dead, echoed in my brain. I tried to get up again, thinking I could bull-rush him and take him down to the floor, but I was like a bloodied, beaten animal about to be put out of its misery, everything reeling and slipping away.

I suddenly found myself on my knees.

“What to do . . . ?” He shook his head and chirped. “Just what to do . . . ?” He spun around the desk chair and sat, facing me.

My brain struggled to clear.

He picked up the remote from the desk and turned on the TV. It was Everybody Loves Raymond. It was bizarre. I recognized it instantly. The one when Ray and Robert go out golfing when Deborah thinks he’s working on his novel . . .

He turned the volume up high.

He sat there and shrugged, his steely eyes glinting with this remote, mirthless smile. “Oh, who needs this,” he said, and tucked the gun into his belt and came back out with a six-inch blade. “I think you already know, doc, there are people who seem to think I’m quite the artist with this thing.”

I tried to stagger up one last time and he just pushed me with his boot, sending me down to the floor.

“I truly wish you’d just kept that cute little nose of yours out of things, doc . . . I kinda like you, I really do.” He kicked me over, faceup. I tried to push my way up one more time, but he pressed his foot onto my chest. My strength was gone. There was a look of inevitability in his coal-black eyes. “But I guess it’s a little late for the big show of affection now.”

I saw the blade dance before me and felt a pain across my cheek, blood trickling into my hands.

“Whoops!” he crowed.

Then with a gleam in his eye, he dug the blade into the nape of my neck, under my chin. A spasm of absolute terror sped down my spine. My eyes shook with tears, tears of just how very stupid I had been. How I’d stepped into something I had no business in. And now I was about to pay for it with my life.

“You killed them,” I said, glaring with whatever strength I still had. “Zorn. Greenway.”

“Ancient history, doc. What we oughta be a bit more focused on is what’s going to happen to you.”

“And Evan,” I said, glaring into his dull, animal eyes.

At that, he sort of chuckled and shrugged impassively. “Let’s face it, doc, it wasn’t like we were robbing the world of a future Nobel Prize winner, don’t you think? But we did think it might get a rise out of his old man.”

A last wave of anger went off in me, and I lunged for his throat. He hit me in the face with the blunt end of the blade and his fist, darkness rolling in front of my eyes. When I opened them again, he had the blade under my chin.

“You know the score here . . . I give this blade a little twist into your carotid artery, you last what, ten, fifteen seconds, before irreversible brain damage begins to occur? Thirty, maybe, at the most, before you bleed out.”

Yes, those were about the numbers.

“Now this may hurt a little, doc . . .” He laughed. “You know, I bet you’ve probably said that to people a thousand times.”

He seized me by the collar. I was listing in and out of consciousness, trying to will myself not to give in.

“Your brother and his wife are going to be dead soon.”

His words reverberated through my brain like far-off echoes, echoes that filled me with remorse that I couldn’t do anything about it. And dread.

And sadness. For Kathy and Maxie and Sophie. Knowing I would never see any of them again. Thinking of the agonizing way they were going to hear of how I died. Probably believing I’d lost my mind out here.

“Oh, and one last thing. You better listen closely, doc . . .” He raised my face, so close to his I could almost feel his smile, the intensity of his eyes.

And as I passed out, he said the words that turned my last nightmare into an even greater hell.