Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗
“Hey!” she called out, slowing to a walk. Almost safe.
One guy, up high stapling something to the wood frame of a house, looked in her direction and shouted something. She wasn’t close enough to hear, but at least he knew she was there.
She’d escaped. Hard to believe that she’d done it, but she had. Her heart started to slow. Her legs felt like lead now that she didn’t need them for running.
Tires squealed. She looked back and saw Dale’s car coming around the corner.
Desperately, she looked at the man on the roof, thinking she could climb the ladder up to him—but the house was too far away. She did the only thing that made sense—she darted between houses onto the next street.
The car kept going to the next corner. She knew he’d try to head her off.
This street was empty—she was all alone. The houses were unfinished, sitting on a pavement of dried mud. Feeling scared again, she took a deep breath and almost choked on the smell of sawdust.
He’d be driving up this street any minute. She had to figure out what to do. Hide? There were plenty of houses around here to hide in, but she discarded the idea—she’d be trapped. No, the best thing was to let him start up this street, then run back through to the street she was just on.
Heart thudding in her chest, she squinted up the block, first one direction, then another.
Suddenly, she heard a car coming behind her. It sounded different from Dale’s. It was a white van. It must be a construction van because the back part didn’t have windows. She stepped out onto the new asphalt of the street and waved her arms.
The van slowed. He was going to stop for her!
Suddenly, Dale’s car came around the corner at the other end of the street and accelerated. He lurched to a stop, got out, and ran toward her.
She had to turn her back on him to run to the van, but she had a good head start. Dale knew it was over, didn’t he? Still, as she ran she imagined she could feel his breath on her neck, the smell of hot oil from the stupid car, his feet pounding on the pavement. Could picture him grabbing her at the last minute—
But it didn’t happen.
A hand propped the passenger door open.
She started to say “thanks,” but the words froze in her throat. Something leaped out at her from the darkness.
Talons grabbed her, hard, pulled her around, a crushing grip around her throat as the thick arm levered her almost off the ground, elbow catching her chin and neck in a vise. She was dragged off her feet, her hip bumping hard against the side of the van. One of her sandals fell to the ground, and with cold clarity, she realized that she would never need it again. Then she was pulled in, backwards, across the seat. Struggling as the driver put the van in gear.
“No!” Dale screamed.
Just before the door slammed shut, she saw Dale Lundy’s eyes, a mirror of her own bottomless terror.
52
Laura left the motor home to Victor and drove the few blocks to DPS. Hard to believe that Lundy had been under their noses all this time. Hidden in plain sight.
Although they had cops crawling all over the Benson Highway area, FBI agents at the airport, Highway Patrol and sheriffs in four counties looking for a white GEO with a Colorado license plate, Lundy had slipped through the net.
He could be anywhere.
She went to see Charlie Specter.
He looked up from his computer. “I was just going to call you. I think Lundy’s got a soulmate.”
[email protected]
He handed her a log of incoming e-mails to Lundy’s account that his server had faxed over:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Charlie leaned back in his chair, watching her face. “How about that? In my professional opinion, this guy is obsessive.”
“Is there a way to find him?” Laura asked.
Charlie sighed. “Livewire’s a big server with a one eight-hundred number. Which is fine—I was able to trace it to Coffee Anon, place on the west side—but these are old.”
“How old?”
“They’re from four days ago.”
“ Nothing since?”
“Unfortunately, no. Maybe they finally got together.”
“Either they connected or Dark Moondancer gave up. I want somebody to go out and talk to the people at the coffee place. Call TPD and see if they can send Barry White.”
She rapped her fingers on the desk. Where to go from here? If Lundy was panicked, he might kill Summer any time and ditch her somewhere.
She stared at the screen. Dark Moondancer. The name struck her as pretentious—extravagant. Like something from a movie. A fantasy.
She had seen or heard those words somewhere before. Recently. There had been something…
The word “fantasy” struck a chord. Lords. Lords and ladies. Role-playing.
Role-playing. She remembered now.
53
Because Laura had come directly to DPS from the airport, her mother’s file and book chapters were still in her suitcase. She got them out and spread them on her desk. There it was—a notation on a scrap of notepaper: “Dk Moondancer?”
She called Barry Fruchtendler and got his machine. She pictured him out there in Montana, a beautiful sunny day, the retired cop out on a stream somewhere, casting flies.
“What’s up?” asked Charlie at her elbow. “You heard of this guy before?”
“I know what Dark Moondancer is—was.”
Charlie waited.
“A role-playing game, like Dungeons and Dragons. Knights, fairies, stuff like that. I don’t know much about it. A few kids at our school played it, but it was really more of a high school and college kid’s game.“
Mostly males. She couldn’t remember if the game was confined to Tucson or if it was popular throughout the country.
“A game?” Specter said. “You sure?”
Laura was thinking out loud. “Mark might know.” Mark Hewitt, her landlord, had gone to school with her. She grabbed the phone book and looked him up. He was home, and he did remember the game.
“The object was to become Dark Moondancer,” he said. “There were groups all over town. I think there was a point system, but it was pretty loose. Game had a bunch of different levels that you had to negotiate to get to the top, the top being the wizard, the powerful one. Only the people who made the top circle had a chance to become Moondancer. They were voted in by their peers.”
“Sounds like Survivor.”
“Long before its time. I think … I think there was a certain time span—a month? Maybe it went by moon phases. Then they’d start over.”
“How did someone get into the top circle?”
“I heard they did outrageous things.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever was outrageous when you were a kid—there were tests. Stealing something, bashing mailboxes, waiting outside a store and getting an adult to buy beer. Running naked down Speedway. Getting a popular girl to give it up.”
From buying beer to getting someone to have sex so you could get a few extra points in a game—a lot of leeway. “Did you know anyone who played?”
He rattled off a few names. Most of them were a year or two ahead and already in high school. She wrote them down.
