Trust Your Eyes

SIXTY-EIGHT

“Where is he?” Lewis barked at me. “Where the hell is he?”

“Gone,” I said.

Howard showed up, fixed his eyes on the empty chair littered with duct tape scraps. What little color there was in his face seemed to drain away instantly. “Dear God.” Then he glared at Lewis. “You let him get away.”

Lewis tore out of the room using the side door, no doubt hoping Thomas had only just left, that he could catch up with him and drag him back. Thomas had only been gone a few seconds, half a minute tops, but if he was running flat out, it would give him enough time to get a healthy head start.

I just hoped that, having gotten away, Thomas would have the sense to go to the police, even if that wasn’t exactly what I’d asked. I’d only told him to get help. I’d assumed he’d know what that meant, but he was no sooner out the door than I wished I’d been more specific.

At the moment, he was my only hope.

“How did-how the hell did he get free?” Howard asked.

“I told you he was talented,” I said, perhaps with just a touch of smugness. “Maybe he’s gone for Vachon. Maybe his people were out there waiting for him. I wonder what they’ll do when he tells them what you-”

Howard snapped. He swung his arm back and hit me across the face with the back of his hand. He put more into it than I would have thought possible for the short little fucker.

“Enough bullshit!” he said.

My cheek burned, my brains rattled.

The curtain opened and it was Morris. “What the hell’s happened now?”

“One of them got away,” Howard said. “The one with the atlas in his head.”

“Atlas?” Morris had a long way to go to get up to speed.

“Lewis has gone looking for him. God help us, he better find him.”

“You can’t keep this up,” Morris said. “You can’t. It’s unraveling. You’re unraveling. You have been for months.” He took out his phone and held it up. “You took my gun but you didn’t take this. I told Heather to take the rest of the night off. In fact, I told her to take the next couple days off. To get out of town. I didn’t want to take any chances. She’s gone. I think that was the last straw for me, Howard. Threatening Heather. A total innocent. You’re a man with no lines left to cross.”

Howard looked at him, no doubt assessing the implications.

“What else did you tell her?”

“I told her you were going to give me a lift home. You and Lewis.”

“So if anything happens to you, she’ll know.”

Morris nodded. His voice was strangely calm. “Let this man go. And you and Lewis would be smart to turn yourselves in. Either that, or you better be on a jet to Bolivia by noon with a couple of new identities. You know the best lawyers in the city, Howard. Pick one out for yourself and one for Lewis. Then the clock’ll start ticking, see who can cut the best deal by ratting out the other. No one knows better than us how the game is played. I guess that’s basically what I’m going to do, too. Howard, let this man go.”

I was already working on it. I’d been straining at the tape around my wrists since the moment Thomas had left. I’d been picking at the edges with my fingernails, trying to create even a tiny bit of slack.

Howard said, “I wish it were that simple, Morris.”

Lewis reappeared, winded. “No sign of him,” he said.

“Morris says we should get lawyers,” Howard said.

“What?”

“He’s not going to play.”

Lewis sneered. “Morris, I thought we had an understanding. What about-”

“Heather’s gone,” he said. “And I’m leaving, too. Don’t worry. I’ll get a cab.”

Morris swept the curtain aside and headed for the front door. Lewis, gun in hand, followed him. “Morris,” he called out.

I heard the same swift sound I’d heard when Lewis shot Nicole. Then a body hitting the floor.

Howard didn’t even look. Didn’t pull back the curtain. He knew what had to have happened. When Lewis reappeared, he walked straight past Howard and came up on my right side.

“Where would your brother go?” he asked me. “Has he got the sense to go to the cops or will he just run and hide somewhere?”

I had to admit the latter was a possibility. “I don’t know,” I said. “If I were you, I’d assume the worst.”

Lewis evidently felt a need to let off some steam just as Howard had, so he hit me, too. Not a slap across the face, but a gun to the side of head. A pistol whip. My right ear exploded in pain, and my left nearly touched my shoulder. I shouted out and watched the room spin around for several seconds.

It was during that period of disorientation I thought I saw Nicole’s arm move, bump ever so slightly into a Dinky Toy tow truck that had fallen from the shelf and landed on its wheels, making it roll forward a quarter of an inch. But then, pretty much everything had seemed to be moving in the seconds after that blow to the head, so I figured I’d imagined it.

“We have to assume we don’t have much time,” Lewis said.

“Great,” Howard said. “Just great. The police may be coming and now we’ve got three bodies to get rid of.”

I wasn’t dead yet, but I figured that time was coming. I continued twisting my wrists back and forth.

“There’s no time for that,” Lewis said. “We just have to get out of here.”

“Where the hell are we going to go?” Howard asked.

“I know people,” Lewis said. “I know people who can hide us until we get the paperwork we need.”

“God, you fucked this whole thing up from the very beginning,” Howard said. “From the moment you decided to kill Fitch, to hiring her”-he pointed to Nicole-“to letting that freak get away.”

“I can go alone,” Lewis said, walking around me, standing between Nicole’s body and me. “If that’s what you’d prefer.”

“Christ,” Howard said, shaking his head in defeat. “Let’s finish this and get the hell out of here.”

I kept twisting and twisting, thinking, if I could manage to get my wrists free, I could propel myself, with the chair attached, at Lewis, somehow grab him by the throat. Anything. Because the gun was in his hand, and I knew his intention was to use it on me in the next few seconds.

But I just wasn’t there yet.

“Okay,” Lewis said, bending his elbow so that the gun was pointing at my head.

And then he screamed. A horrific, gut-wrenching scream.

When he cast his eyes down at the source of his pain, I did as well.

There was an ice pick right through his calf.