Then she was in front of Janney. He was saying something to her. She heard the sound but it reached her brain as a low, indistinguishable rumble. She saw he was laughing and pointing to the gurney where he had lifted the sheet that had been draped over it.
She looked down, too disoriented to be shocked, too numb to react. It wasn’t Felicia Rodriguez they were hiding. It was a little blonde-haired girl in a white gown. She lay stretched out, her hands folded neatly across her chest.
So peaceful. Lauren thought, barely lucid. Dear, sweet Sarah. You look so peaceful.
Unable to fight off the drug any longer, she collapsed. Janney and Scott Moran arranged mother and daughter onto the gurney together, threw the blanket over the two bodies, and headed for the elevator.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Jack hung a sign on the police station door that told anyone who might stop by that it was closed for the night. It was a long-shot, but they figured they might get lucky and buy themselves a little extra time before anyone found the officers locked in the jail cell in the rear of the building. Next, they found the keys to an unmarked sedan parked behind the station, and drove out slowly so as not to attract any attention.
They made a quick stop at Lonetree’s Bronco. He had parked it far enough away from the hospital that the police hadn’t connected it to him. Still, they decided to keep the sedan, thinking it less conspicuous than the SUV. Jack stayed in the car as Lonetree rummaged around the back and emerged with a duffel bag.
Jack raised an eyebrow at Lonetree as he climbed back into the sedan.
“New boots,” Lonetree said, gunning the engine. “And a few other supplies.”
As they drove away, Jack spotted Midland Hospital down the street and felt a pang of guilt. Lauren had to be going through hell. He ought to be with her, comforting her. Or at least he ought to let her know that he was going after their daughter. But she would never believe him. The way she left the jail, he was sure – if given the chance — she would turn them in.
A flash of lights behind them shook him from his thoughts. He grabbed the door handle in a panic. They had two choices if it was a cop: turn themselves in or take the cop out. He knew what Lonetree would do. What scared him was that he would go along with anything in order to keep going. Nothing would keep him from reaching the cave.
Fortunately, the flashing lights weren’t from a police cruiser but from an ambulance rushing away from Midland Hospital. Lonetree pulled the car over to the side and slowed down, telling Jack to hide his face. The ambulance whipped past them, all sirens and lights. He tracked the vehicle as it hurried up the road ahead of them, fighting back a feeling that the ambulance should mean something to him. He shrugged off the intuition, chalking it up to the guilt he felt over leaving Lauren behind at the hospital.
Her abandonment made sense on a rational level. If the roles were reversed, he wondered if he would act any differently. Still, no matter how much he rationalized her reaction, it still hurt. The look on her face when she walked away, the one that convicted him of taking their little girl and doing God knew what to her, would stay with him forever.
Crouched in his seat, waiting for the ambulance to pass, was all the time he needed to have the emotions wash over him again. It was a waste of energy, and there was nothing he could do about it now. The only things that mattered were getting to Sarah in time and making the sons-a-bitches pay for what they had done to his family. After that, he and Lauren would be able to sort things out. For now, it was better if she didn’t know what was going on. Better if she were safe in the hospital where she could take care of Becky. Then a thought occurred to him that sent shivers up his spine.
If he died tonight Lauren would never know the truth. She would live the rest of her life believing that he kidnapped their daughter. And Becky. The poor girl would grow up as the kid whose dad had gone crazy, chopped up her sister and stuffed her in a hole somewhere. Little girls didn’t grow up right after something like that, did they?
“It’s gone now. You can get up,” Lonetree said. He shifted the car back into gear and they rolled forward.
“Have you been to Huckley’s house?”
Lonetree nodded. “Yeah, staked it out from a distance. Your friend Max confirmed what was in my brother’s notes. He said that Huckley was a bona fide psychic and that the Taking ritual had only made him more sensitive. I think it was how they finally caught up with him. One of his last entries was how he suspected Huckley could even hear thoughts at some level. I didn’t want to get too close in case he felt he was being watched.”
“Did he ever notice you?”
“Every time. I’d be watching him move around the house through binoculars and he’d turn and look right at me. It would only be for a second or two, more of a reflex than anything else, like when you see an animal in the wild. He knew I was there, I’m sure of it.”
Lonetree pushed the sedan up to seventy miles an hour on the freeway. They needed to hurry but the last thing they needed was to be pulled over for a traffic ticket in a stolen police car. It would be hard to talk their way out of that one.
Ten minutes later, Lonetree exited the freeway and wound through back roads until they came to a stop at the end off of a dirt road.
“This is it. There’s a farmhouse about a quarter mile back. There are a couple of barns and outbuildings. I’m guessing the elevator for the mineshaft is set up in one of them.”
Jack peered down the driveway. Something was nagging at him. “How far are we from the tunnel where you took me the first time?”
“Less than ten minutes on back roads. Why?”
“Something you said back at the jail has been bothering me.” Jack said. “You said even if they hear us coming, they’ll have to come through us to get out.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, they’re definitely going to hear us coming, aren’t they? We’re going down a mineshaft in an elevator. Not exactly stealth mode.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that it’s a good plan if our goal is to get into a gun fight and try to kill these guys. But if the goal is to save my little girl, then we should be sneaking up on them through the tunnel. Right?”
Lonetree cracked his neck side to side. “You know what my purpose is,” he said coldly. “I’m here to kill that son-of-a-bitch who killed my brother. This Boss person is down there. If we go in the other way, they could be coming up the main entrance as we’re going down. We could miss them all together and I still wouldn’t know who he is.”
“To save my daughter, we need to have surprise on our side. The tunnel’s the only way to do that,” Jack argued, “If we miss them, you can kill Huckley and the others later, but I only get one chance to save Sarah.”
“I’ve been working for a year to find the Boss. He’s down there right now. All of them are together. How can you ask me to pass that up?”
Jack didn’t give an answer because he didn’t have one. Lonetree looked down the road in front of him, the road to Huckley’s, the road to his revenge. Jack watched as the veins in the big man’s neck stood out from clenching his teeth together. Jack stared at him. And waited.
He understood the battle that raged inside Lonetree. He guessed they felt the same emotions. Somewhere inside, in a dark corner where all the horrors of his imagination were trapped and pent up, Jack did not believe he would ever see his little girl alive again. This thought, so terrible that his sanity could not give it any credence, had borne a dark, brooding offspring: revenge. He wanted to inflict horrible violence on Sarah’s captors. Make them endure the most unspeakable tortures he could create. Lonetree’s revenge was for an actual loss. Both a brother and a father. And this loss had fermented for years.