I went back into the study, dialed Trixie’s personal number. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hey,” I said.
“Zack,” Trixie said. “How’s your dad?”
“He’s okay.”
“Sarah said. But she said there were some other problems. Did everything go okay?”
“Things…are okay. If I weren’t so tired, I’d tell you all about it now, but as they say in the newspaper biz, you can read all about it tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Listen,” I said. “I kind of had to rush off when we were having lunch Tuesday, and maybe I’m wrong, but I had the feeling there was something you wanted to talk to me about.”
It was quiet at the other end of the line.
“Trixie?”
“Yeah?”
“If I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong, tell me. You just seemed, I don’t know, like there was something you wanted to get off your chest.”
Another long pause. Finally, she spoke.
“I’m in trouble,” Trixie said.
will be back in May 2007 with
STONE RAIN
another suspenseful
Zack Walker adventure.
Read on for a preview…
Stone Rain
On sale May 2007
MIRANDA HEARD NOISES coming from the bottom of the stairs. They were back. If they find me here, she thought, they’ll kill me.
It had to be them, downstairs in the bar. It was after hours, after all. Everyone else had cleared out. The Kickstart had been closed, the girls had been sent home. They’d be coming upstairs any moment now.
Oh yeah, they’d kill her. Well, maybe not Leo. Chances were he wouldn’t kill her. Gary would be the one to actually kill her. But Leo, he wouldn’t do anything to stop it. He always let Gary take the lead in these things. I’ll end up as dead as the others, Miranda thought.
If I don’t get out of here right now.
The others hadn’t been dead long.
Only minutes, although it seemed much longer. It was true what they said, Miranda thought, about things slowing down. Maybe that’s why, in the movies, when something terribly dramatic was happening, they ran it in slow-motion. Not just because it was a neat effect, but because it was a reflection of human experience. Maybe your brain had to play tricks with time, give you a chance to absorb what the hell was happening so you could figure out how to deal with it.
Miranda felt as though she’d been in this room with the three dead men for some time now. But maybe it hadn’t even been minutes. Maybe it had only been a few seconds. She wasn’t sure.
All she knew for certain was that they were dead. You didn’t need a medical degree to figure that out. All you had to do was look at them. Sprawled out across the floor, not stirring, their shirts and pants soaked with blood.
Payne, dead. Eldridge, dead. Zane, dead.
And only moments before, all alive.
Eldridge had been the last to die. He’d hung on long enough to look into her eyes and say, “Candy. Help me.”
But there was no helping him now.
Even before she heard them at the bottom of the stairs, she tried to pull herself together, to think. Focus, she thought. Focus.
She poked her head out the door and into the dingy hallway. To the left, the stairs. The smell of stale beer, human sweat, and cigarettes wafted up. To the right, at the end of the hallway, a window that opened onto the fire escape.
Miranda grabbed her bag and ran for the window, pushed up on it. It didn’t want to budge.
The voices were getting closer. Maybe halfway up. She could hear their footsteps. She pushed harder on the stuck window, and it rose an inch, just enough for her to slip her fingers under it. She put everything she had into lifting it, opened it wide enough to get one leg out and planted on the rusted metal grating. Then she swung her body through, her other leg.
She caught a glimpse of them entering the far end of the hallway as she pressed herself against the building’s cold brick wall. And then, as if willing herself to be weightless, she descended the metal stairs without a sound, and when she reached the bottom, ran off into the night.
She knew she’d have to get away and never come back. She couldn’t go to the police. She was on her own.
She would have to disappear. She’d have to make it so no one ever found her.
Because she knew he’d be looking. And she knew he’d never give up.
1
YOU HAVE TO EMPTY all the change out of your pockets,” the uniformed woman told me. “And I need your wallet.”
For a second, I thought about making a joke. Maybe, under less stressful circumstances, I might have. A visit to a prison under normal conditions—does anyone visit a prison under normal conditions?—would have been stressful enough. But my reasons for being here were far from normal. And there wasn’t anything normal about the guy sitting in the pickup truck, out in the prison parking lot, waiting for me to do what I’d come here to do.