Quickly she descended, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other. The intense, narrow beam played over concrete steps and cinder block walls.
The cellar was large and musty and damp. No windows. No other doors.
Just as Ally had said: no way out.
Following a trail of muddy shoe prints, Cain entered the kitchen just as the side door burst open, the security chain snapping, and Tyler pivoted through the doorway.
His Glock swung toward Cain, and for a bad moment Cain expected to get iced by friendly fire. Then Tyler’s face registered recognition, and sheepishly he lowered the gun.
“Bitches locked me out,” he mumbled. “I thought I was walking into a trap.”
“Don’t sweat it.” Cain knew all of them were operating on an adrenaline high. “Just stay alert. They’re somewhere close.”
He studied the soiled floor, the confusion of tracks. His quarries had advanced and backtracked, their movements erratic, panicky.
Still, they’d found some sort of hiding place.
Cain opened every kitchen cabinet, looked on all sides of the central island.
Nothing.
He moved into the laundry area, thinking vaguely of the washing machine and dryer, each perhaps roomy enough for a crouching person.
Then he saw the cellar door.
Of course.
Trish swept the cellar with her flashlight’s beam. “Is there a phone down here”
“No.” Ally’s brown eyes, huge with fear, glinted in the dimness. “My folks just use this place for storage. Old Ashcroft heirlooms.”
Trish went on exploring with her flash. The wavering funnel of light played over antique chairs wrapped in cellophane, oil portraits elaborately framed, handcrafted dressers glazed with dust. Amid the furniture and art objects stood stacks of cardboard cartons and wooden crates, meticulously labeled and tagged.
The clutter offered no shortage of hiding places, but concealment would buy them only an extra minute or two. What they needed was a means of escape.
“How about a circuit breaker box” She was thinking aloud, her voice thin and strained. “We can trip the breakers, get away in the dark before they know what’s happened.”
Ally shook her head. “Breaker box is in the garage. Anyway, there’s a backup generator. For earthquakes.”
Trish kept looking. The beam of light prowled the floor. It came to rest on a wooden panel mounted in a square cement frame, near the center of the room.
“What’s that” Pointing with the flash.
“Cover for a well.” Ally spoke in a robot’s voice. “They built this house on the foundation of the original Ashcroft place. Well was dry, so they put a lid on it.”
“We could hide in there, under the cover …”
“The bad guys would find us.”
Trish silently conceded the point. Of course they would.
She was getting desperate, that was all. She was losing it.
“Give up, Trish.” Ally’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “There’s no hope.”
She looked at the girl. Brambles gleamed in her unkempt hair. The white dress was a muddy rag. Her bare feet looked very small against the floor’s gray expanse.
Trish thought of toe tags. She pushed the image away.
“There’s always hope,” she said. “Always.”
Nice thought. Inspirational. Mrs. Wilkes, her long-ago Girl Scout leader, would have approved.
But the truth was, they were finished.
She must have been crazy to come back to this house, crazy to go up against Cain and his personal death squad. Even Pete Wald wouldn’t have risked it, and he was a veteran cop with twenty years of field experience, while she … well, she was a rank amateur.
You blew it, Trish, said a small, scared voice in her mind. You screwed up after all.
Upstairs Cain’s heavy footsteps rumbled closer, the footsteps of a fairy-tale giant combing his castle for intruders.
Directly outside the cellar he stopped.
The sharp intake of breath was Ally’s.
Trish set down the flashlight, then aimed the Glock at the head of the staircase.
Shivering with tension, blinking sweat out of her eyes, she prepared to make a last stand.
38
Tyler followed Cain’s gaze and focused on the closed door. “Cellar,” he said, remembering the blueprints he’d studied.
Cain nodded. “This is the only access. They’re trapped.”
“Yeah. But Robinson’s in a good defensive position. She can take out anybody who goes down the stairs.”
“Unless we take her out first.” Cain glanced at Tyler and lifted an eyebrow. “There’s a way.”
“How”
“Stay here.” He brushed past Tyler. “I need my duffel. Stashed it in the den.”
“Hey, what’s the plan, boss”
At the kitchen doorway Cain glanced back. A smile split his face like a second scar.
“Souvenir from Yuma,” he said, and he was gone.
“Why don’t they come down” Ally breathed, chewing her bruised lip, oblivious of pain.
Trish couldn’t figure it out either. She tried to see the situation from Cain’s point of view-the closed door, the cellar stairs …
It was like a drill she’d run at the academy. To barge into the cellar was to risk being cut down in an ambush.
“They’re scared I’ll get the drop on them.” She tested the laser sight, beaming a red dot on the door. “I’ve got a tactical advantage.”
“You mean you can hold them off”
She wanted to say yes, but the truth was less comforting. “Doesn’t look like they’re going to try a frontal assault.”
“What else can they do”
One set of footsteps departed. Cain pounded through the kitchen, into the living room.
Trish listened to him go. “They’ll think of something,” she said softly, somehow certain they already had.
Tyler loitered in the laundry area, staying shy of the door. Most likely it had a hollow core. Robinson could punch a bullet through it if she had a mind to.
Not a good idea to get killed now. For one thing, he didn’t want to miss what was coming up.
Smiling, he remembered Yuma. It was the first time he had ever worked with Cain.
The two had met in the state prison at Lompoc, where Tyler was doing time for his role in an auto chop shop. Cain had been in for knocking over a gas station on Interstate 10, ordinarily a simple enough job, except that a state trooper had happened along at the worst possible moment.
Cain got out first. After finishing his own sentence, Tyler tracked him down in Indio. He was living in a squalid trailer, off by itself at the edge of town, amid the sun-scarred flats and humming power lines.
Lilith was there too. Though only fifteen, she’d been Cain’s girl even before his year-long stint in prison; he liked to start them young. Having seen Cain naked in the shower, Tyler sometimes wondered how the petite, slim-waisted waif could handle him.
But of course Lilith liked pain.
Cain offered Tyler work, which Tyler readily accepted. And that was how they ended up in Yuma, Arizona, long past midnight, peering through a steel chain fence at Southern Pacific Railroad’s east freight yard.
A single guard desultorily performed his rounds. Cain waited for him to go inside the office and warm his hands over the radiator-it was February, cold in the desert night-then snipped through the chain link with bolt cutters, gouging a man-sized hole in the fence.
Dressed in black, Cain and Tyler and two others entered the yard and pried open the back of a freight car. After that, it was only a matter of unloading carton after carton, spiriting the boxes through the fence into a trailer hooked to Cain’s van.
They had taken only as much as the trailer could hold, a mere fraction of the freight car’s contents. Still, the haul had been considerable.