Snowbound - Crouch Blake (мир книг .TXT) 📗

Her stomach ached with hunger, and she was reaching for a strip of bacon when voices erupted from the kitchen.

She rushed out of the dining room, up the passage, and, upon nearing the lobby, remembered leaving her parka and snow pants in the library, her gut telling her it would be a disaster if they were found.

The lobby stood empty.

She crossed the stone floor.

The door to the library was closed, and she put her ear to it, detecting the noise of the fire, nothing else.

It was empty inside, and her clothes lay exactly where she’d left them on the floor beside the cellar door.

As she picked them up, fast-approaching footsteps drove an electric shock of adrenaline down her spine.

She spun around, taking stock of available exits, anyplace she might hide, but there was just the furniture and the French doors, straining against all the snow that had piled up on the veranda.

With the footsteps seconds from the library, she lunged for the cellar door, palming the doorknob, turning it, praying the hinges wouldn’t squeak.

She slipped through into darkness, had it almost closed when two men strolled into the library, the door slamming after them. They stopped before the fireplace, just five feet away, Devlin watching through the four-millimeter crack between the door and the door frame.

“Goddamn it, Sean,” said the older of the two, a silver-haired man, tall, wide-shouldered, dressed in exquisite navy slacks and a plaid shirt rolled up to his elbows.

“Dad, I feel sick—”

“Lighten up.”

“This isn’t right. You know it.” Sean looked very much like his father facially, subtracting the wrinkles and the gray, adding some baby fat, though he wasn’t as tall, or as powerfully built.

The older man put both of his hands on his son’s shoulders.

“Don’t embarrass me, Sean.”

“Dad, there are women—”

“Lower your fucking voice. Nobody’s making you do anything. Go sit in your room the whole time, for all I—”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Me?” Devlin remembered the older man’s name—Ken. “I don’t know.” Ken walked out of Devlin’s line of site and Sean followed, the two just voices now, operating at scarcely more than a whisper. “Listen to me. You heard what Ethan said at breakfast, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“So deal with it.”

“I can’t be here for five days, Dad.”

“Hey, I twisted some major arms to get you on this trip. You know how many of my guys would kill—”

“Yeah, thanks so much for that.”

“Now wait just a doggone minute. I didn’t know it was gonna be, you know. . . .”

“What’d you think when they loaded us into floatplanes with blacked-out windows? Wouldn’t tell us where we were going?”

“Look, Sean, you’re here. You aren’t leaving early. So make the best of it.”

“How?”

“I don’t care, just . . . don’t embarrass me.”

“Fuck you.”

Footsteps tracked across the library, and Devlin heard the door open.

“Sean, come back. Sean!”

His father went after him, the library quiet again, just the fire crackling.

Devlin waited two minutes, straining to pick out the slightest patter of returning footsteps, but the men were gone.

She eased the cellar door open, moving carefully through the library, then into the lobby, where she stood holding her parka and snow pants, listening to distant voices, the clatter of door slams traveling up and down the corridors above.

She wandered into the south wing, quiet here and empty, just the ceiling lights humming above her.

There were peepholes in these doors as well, and she stopped at each to look inside, saw women behind three of the doors, sitting up in bed in skimpy lingerie, waiting.

At the end of the corridor, she turned the doorknob of an empty room, 119.

The door opened. She stepped inside, shut it.

She stashed her pants and parka in a chest of drawers across from the bed, then, taking out the .357, crouched under the peephole for five long minutes, willing back the fear, the tears.

FORTY-SIX

She slipped back into the corridor, then into the alcove and up the stairwell to the second floor. She hadn’t gone five steps before she heard voices up ahead. Devlin slowed, inching her way into the alcove, glancing around the corner. The corridor was empty.

She looked back through the alcove window, saw that it was still snowing, spruce trees loaded with powder. Even from inside, she could hear branches creaking, snapping under the weight.

She eased out into the corridor, stopping at each door she passed to glance through the peephole—more women, half-naked, lying in bed and staring absently into space.

Ten steps into the corridor, someone groaned behind the door of 215.

Devlin stopped, felt a knot in her stomach, thought she might be sick.

She stepped forward, put her ear to the door.

Zig’s voice: “You like that, don’t you, you naughty girl?”

“Yes.”

“Convince me.”

Through the door, Devlin heard the woman moan.

Zig: “Yeah, that’s . . . oh . . . that’s better, oh God.”

Footsteps were ascending the stairs at the lobby end of the corridor.

She turned back, hurried into the alcove, ducked around the corner, and glanced back in time to see someone emerge into the corridor.

As the person drew closer, she saw it was a man—short, wide, pit-bull jaw, cropped blond hair, shotgun hanging from a strap around his neck.

Every few doors, he’d stop to look through a peephole, lingering a little longer at 215.

Devlin turned and started up the steps.

The fifth cracked under her weight, footsteps audible now in the corridor below, the man definitely coming.

She moved quickly into the third-floor corridor, passing the brass-numbered doors: 314, 312, 310. She tried 308, but it was locked.

The man with the shotgun must have hit the noisy step, because a loud crack resounded through the corridor.

The doorknob to 306 turned. She slipped inside, her heart pounding in her chest. Out of instinct, she peered through the peephole, realized instantly that she was staring through it backward, the view long and distorted, like looking through the strong prescription lenses of her father’s reading glasses. She could hear the man’s footsteps coming down the corridor, wondered if he’d actually seen or heard her. She turned away from the door, squatted down out of sight in a corner beside the bed, the gun quivering in her hands as the footsteps passed by the door.

She stayed in the room for a long time. When she finally built up the nerve to leave, she got to her feet and moved over to the door, listened. Silence. She glanced through the peephole, and what she could see of the corridor was empty.

She pulled the door open, poked her head outside. It took her a moment to remember where she was. Third floor, south wing. She crept out into the corridor, the lodge momentarily quiet.

When she reached the stairs, she glanced down into the lobby, saw a kimonoed man thirty feet below disappearing into the first-floor corridor.

Devlin took the stairs up to the only corridor she’d yet to search—the south wing’s fourth floor. As she climbed, she spotted that longhaired man in the cowboy hat, strolling the third floor of the north wing with his shotgun, his back to her, walking away.

The fourth floor was empty.

She crept up to each door, peered through the peephole, taking note of which rooms were occupied, which vacant and unlocked.

At the end of the corridor, she came to 429, the last room on the left-hand side before the alcove and the stairwell. She stood on her tiptoes, leaned in to look through the peephole. Inside, a woman was sitting in bed. She was wearing a yellow chemise, her hair long and dark, the color indistinguishable in the poor light. Her face was turned toward the window and she was watching the snow fall. Devlin could tell by looking through the thin fabric of her nightgown that the woman was with child, perhaps half term, her face a little swollen from the pregnancy, and pale, with dark bags under her eyes.