Fat chance, assholes, she thinks.
Cole walks out from behind her and into the foyer. The house’s front door stands open to the driveway. Beyond, more rifles, more men in combat gear, and farther out, impossibly, the giant hulk of a helicopter that’s somehow landed just outside the house’s front fence.
With each rifle she walks past, with each soldier down in a crouch, ready to fire, the momentousness of what she’s capable of is somehow more apparent to her than it was as she broke Pemberton’s bones. Down there in the basement, the twisted laws of his madness ruled.
Up here she is a terrifying aberration amid firepower that could have overpowered her only an hour before.
She follows Cole outside.
When they reach a fallen section of fence, she sees Luke, Marty, Rucker, and Brasher standing in a huddle off to one side of the driveway, watched over by windbreaker-clad guys like the ones she assumes are taking Pemberton into custody down in the basement right now.
She stops.
Cole stops.
“I’ll bring them to you once we’re done,” he says. “They’ll be safe. I promise you.”
Luke makes eye contact with her, nods. His expression is stone cold, jaw tense, but the nod’s slight enough to say it’s intended just for her. She figures he’s telling her to do whatever these people have said. Telling her he doesn’t feel like the group’s in any immediate danger if she leaves. She doesn’t know whether or not to trust his judgment. For the first time, she sees the rest of Marty’s crew, the guys who should have been up at the surveillance point. They’re huddled with the group, too. How they got rounded up, she has no idea. But seeing them all together frightens her. Yes, she has strength. Impossible, almost otherworldly strength, but to fight off an army of this size would require coordination and skills well beyond that.
“Charley?” Cole calls.
“What do you want from me?” she asks. “Why can’t they come with us?”
“Because there isn’t room.” He smiles and gestures to the helicopter, as if he’s inviting her to dine with him at an exclusive restaurant. He starts toward her. She feels every man in her vicinity stiffen and raise his weapon by an inch or two. “Charley, do you really think I’m going to try something stupid at two thousand feet with you in your current condition?”
“You get thirty minutes. If you don’t put me down after thirty minutes, with them, we’ll all get to see how I fare in a crash landing.”
“Deal.” His smile is bright, confident, as if he’s never seen the horrors in Pemberton’s basement, as if he’s the type of man who’ll be able to stash them away for the rest of his life. Maybe he is.
There are two other men standing next to the chopper’s open door. The tall bald one radiates a quiet confidence that some of the other men lack, even as they point guns at her. The other is short, bespectacled, and his rigidity and vacant-eyed stare as she approaches could either be terror or a laserlike focus that borders on sociopathy. Or he’s terrified of whatever’s inside the thick briefcase he holds in both arms.
Cole steps inside the passenger compartment, which she sees is much more spacious than she thought.
The other two wait for her to go first. The bald one gives her a polite nod as she steps past him, as if she were any other guest. As if this were just another corporate flight on a busy CEO’s calendar.
Careful not to touch anything, she takes a seat on the leather-upholstered bench seat across from Cole. The engine starts up. The blades spin, slicing the glare cast by the house’s security lights. The other two men pile into the helicopter after her, taking seats on opposite sides of Cole.
The bald one slides the cargo door shut. Soft golden light fills the cabin from running lights along the roof and the floor. It’s insane, this juxtaposition. The distance she seems to have traveled between one world and another in no more than a few paces.
Then, suddenly, they’re rising into the air. Her heart lurches as Luke, Marty, and the rest of them disappear under tree cover. As they ascend over the valley, she wonders if the unreality of this, rising into the air this suddenly, watching the house of horrors below shrink down to the size of a child’s dollhouse, will somehow separate her from the nightmares in that basement.
No, she realizes, but the memory of Pemberton’s sobs will make the nightmares bearable.
For the first time since liftoff, she looks into Cole’s eyes.
He introduces the bald man sitting next to him as Ed Baker, his director of security. Ed wisely doesn’t attempt to shake her hand. When it’s clear he’s not going to introduce the shorter guy in spectacles to his left, Charley says, “And who are you?”
The man just stares at her.
“This is Mark Hetherington. He’s also with my security team, but he has a background as a registered nurse, and when it’s appropriate and you consent, he’ll take a sample of your blood.”
Now Cole’s staring at her, too.
“Will you allow me to do that, Charley? Will you allow me to take a sample of your blood?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
Cole smiles, taps the briefcase Mark now holds on his lap. Mark pops it open. She glimpses thick foam padding with indentations holding several different vials. They look empty, but she can’t be sure. Mark opens up a second compartment within, removes a thick file folder, and hands it to Cole. In turn, he hands it to her.
“Let start with this,” he says cheerfully. “I think you’ll be very interested in what’s inside.”
40
“I’m not really good at flipping pages right now,” she says.
Her voice sounds like someone else’s—something between a growl and a whisper. They seem to be heading east, toward the Arizona border, over mountainous terrain that will soon yield to the Anza-Borrego Desert.
The cabin is surprisingly quiet given the size of the rotors overhead: a floating, padded cell.
Cole reaches across the space between them, presses a button just over her shoulder. A pin-spot light clicks to life, shining a bright halo down on her lap, revealing the bloodstains on her jeans, the loose flaps where Pemberton sliced the legs. Cole’s nose comes within inches of hers as he withdraws. Kissing distance, almost. She’s not sure if he genuinely wants her to read the file, or if he wants to show her he’s not afraid, that he trusts her not to tear his arm off.
With all the effort she can manage, she opens the file without ripping it in half. Finds herself staring down at a page printed with large side-by-side photographs, one of a toddler-aged boy who strikes her as immediately familiar. The other’s Dylan. The resemblance between the two is undeniable; they share not only Dylan’s sculpted chin but also his relaxed, attentive gaze.
“I can summarize the contents if you like,” Cole says, “but the file’s yours to keep.”
She tries to nod but can’t manage it. It’s sinking in suddenly, what the page before her means, and maybe if her veins weren’t enflamed with impossible strength, she’d feel like an idiot for not having seen it sooner.
Of course Dylan didn’t pick the Saguaro Wellness Center at random. Didn’t even pick Scarlet, Arizona, at random, and now, it’s clear, most certainly didn’t pick her at random. Why didn’t she see it the other night when she was journaling about all the victims? The boy who was whisked off to a foreign country. Given a new life so different from hers. Or so she thought.
“Lilah Turlington,” she says. “He’s her son.”
“Yes. The Bannings killed his mother and her boyfriend just like they killed your mother. After their disappearance, he was taken out of the country, given a new identity.”
“The uncle. The one who works in gas pipelines.”