Thicker Than Blood - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги онлайн TXT) 📗

"Doesn’t matter," Andrew said. "They’re all psychopaths. Now go and take the hacksaw with you so they don’t see it."

The creaking had stopped.

Horace reached forward, felt the side of the wall, and stepped into the passageway. There wasn’t even the subtlest inference of light. Horace groped for the wall, found it, and crept away from the alcove, away from the stairs, staying close to the left side of the tunnel.

After ten steps the wall ended.

Reaching around he found that he could palm both sides of it.

He stood at the fork in the corridor.

Gazing back through swimming darkness toward the alcove, his eyes played tricks on him, firing phantom bursts of light.

The silence roared.

He strained to listen, thought he heard things—voices, footsteps—but it might’ve been his own heartbeat hammering against his eardrum.

When he saw the lanternlight on the stone he doubted his eyes. But the shadows were real, as was the sound of shuffling footsteps, and then the silhouette of a crooked old woman emerging from around a bend in the tunnel.

Horace slipped back into the adjacent corridor.

The voice he heard was soft, sweet, and utterly disarming.

"Rufus and I heard something. Ya’ll wanna go ahead and tell me what it was?"

"We haven’t heard anything," Andrew responded.

"No?"

The old woman laughed. Horace peeked around the corner, saw her standing in robe and slippers in the threshold of the alcove, firelight from the lantern playing on her deeply wrinkled face.

"Well that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all year, because the door under the stairs was open. How do you think that happened?"

"We haven’t heard a thing," Andrew repeated. "I was as—"

"It doesn’t matter now," the old woman said, "because Luther locked the door, so there won’t be any leaving. He and Rufus are searching the basement right now. Rufus knows it so well, he can do it in the dark."

The old woman turned away from the alcove and started back toward the stairs, taking the light of the lantern with her, leaving Horace Boone alone in the black.

56

I will wake up in my room at the Harper Castle.

It will be warm.

The sun will reflect off the harbor.

I will get dressed and walk outside into the cool morning.

I will walk to the Ocracoke Coffee Company.

I will write this scene tomorrow over breakfast.

And if that pretty cashier is there, I will talk to her.

Tell her I’m a writer.

Ask her on a date, because I’ve never done that before and after tonight what is there to fear?   

Horace dropped the hacksaw and tightened the shoulder straps on his backpack.

He sat leaning against the stone wall.

His entire body quaked and the more he tried to deny it the more he knew how gravely fucked he was. He’d never known this caliber of terror. It seemed to coat his insides like melted silver. And what magnified it was the knowledge that he’d come here on his own, dragged himself into the shit.

Down the corridor he thought he heard footsteps in the dirt.

Horace came to his feet.

The footsteps stopped.

Someone exhaled.

He strained to listen.

The darkness gaped with a silence that seemed to hum though he knew that sound was only the blood between his ears.

A light overhead flicked on and off.

So brief was its illumination he’d have missed them had he blinked.

But he didn’t.

And in that half-second snapshot of light he glimpsed tunnel walls, dirt floor, ax and shotgun, and not twenty feet away, the two men who held them—one old, one young—grinning at him.

A voice emerged from the darkness.

"What do you think you’re doing, young man?"

Horace could hardly breathe.

"I was following Andrew Thomas."

"Who are you?"

"Horace Boone."

Horace backed slowly into the tunnel as they conversed in darkness.

"I saw Andrew Thomas in a bookstore in Alaska last April." Then fighting tears, "I’ve been following him because I want to write a book about him. I swear that’s all. I have a notebook in my backpack that’ll prove it." His voice broke at the end.

"You came here on foot?"

"I left my car in the trees near your mailbox. I just want to write a book about—"

"And you’re here alone?"

"Yessir. I’m so sorry. I know I shouldn’t’ve—"

"Well, Luther, what do you think? Should we give him a head start?"

"Fuck no."

A flashlight suddenly burned in Horace’s eyes.

He saw the twenty-eight-inch barrel pass through the lightbeam, shook shook, and he dove to the floor as the light went out.

There was an orange blossom.

Earsplitting boom.

He smelled gunpowder as the spray of buckshot hit the stone behind him.

And Horace was back on his feet, running blind into the dark.

57

IT was in the late afternoon when the shaft of light passed through the stone and lit the oval patch of rock.

Beth staggered to her feet.

The manacles and a sixteen-inch length of chain still hung from her left wrist. She’d spent several hours to no avail trying to squeeze her hand free.

Beth stood in bare feet, in her filthy yellow teddy, gazing down at Andy and Violet.

They’d all huddled in darkness last night, listening to the shotgun blasts, wondering what had happened to that young man.

"Come here," Andy whispered.

She knelt, their faces close in the musty twilight.

"Beth, just get out of this place. That’s your first priority. Get somewhere safe before you try to do anything."

She nodded, moved over to the twenty-something blond, whose once smart black suit now adorned her like rags.

"Violet," she whispered, touching her face, running her fingers across the top of her dirty matted hair, "You’re going to have your baby."

Vi’s eyes welled.

"Be safe, Beth."

And Beth stood, stepped from the alcove into the tunnel, glancing back at her cellmates, barely visible in the temporary stream of sunlight.

Then she started into the corridor.

After three steps the darkness was total. She could hear hammering somewhere in the black distance. She dragged her right hand along the wall as a guide. Shards of laughter reverberated through the darkness, the dirt cool beneath her feet. She thought of her children. Drove them from her mind, thinking, Just get outside, under the blue sky, and go from there.

She walked into three deadends before she saw the light.

It came from a doorway twenty feet ahead.

The chain dangling from her wrist knocked into the stone wall.

Spurning the impotence in her knees, she crept forward until the voices became perfectly clear.

Rufus carefully let go of the oak strip he’d been pressing into the back of the chair for the last five minutes. The strip would serve as a sleeve for the heavy copper wire that ran up the backside of the four-by-four. Now that the wood glue had hardened, Rufus stepped back and admired his chair. It was crude, yes, but in a terrifyingly utilitarian fashion.

It would be so beautifully lethal.

Maxine sat in a corner reading At Home in Mitford.

Luther was crouched over a sheet of copper.

"Pop, what’d you do with the hacksaw? I have one more cut to make, and I can’t find it."

"Haven’t seen it."

"Mom, you haven’t touched it?"