Читать книгу House Of Secrets - Tracy Montoya - Страница 9

Stumbling over a loose brick, the boy lurched down the well-worn path. The open doorway before him grew taller and wider and blacker, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. But it was no white rabbit he was chasing.

Urgency wrapped itself around his narrow chest, threatening to squeeze the air out of his thin frame. And even though he knew he had to go inside, he skidded to a stop, breathing hard. The doorway of the large Victorian house stretched and undulated above him.

He looked down at the scuffed white tops of his Nikes. He was small. Weak. And the house, which was so beautiful during the daytime, frightened him to the core in the dark.

“Mama,” he breathed, looking down at his hands. They were the hands of a ten-year-old, and the sight of them made him feel that something was very wrong. They should have been bigger hands, stronger hands. Squinting his eyes shut, he willed them to grow into the hands that should have been his. When he looked at them again, he saw they had not.

He jerked his head up, and the scenery around him blurred and darkened. Then he was inside.

“Mama?” he called, pitching his voice as low as he could to keep from sounding like a crybaby, even though he felt like one. A floorboard creaked above him, and he saw a ripple of movement in the shadows on the stairway. A breeze blew across his cheek, sending the door crashing shut behind him.

He cringed at the sound and hurled his body toward the wall, seeking the security of something to grab onto. His hand closed around one of the carved wooden newel posts flanking the large staircase in the front foyer. He traced his fingers around the whorls and dips of the carved shape of a horse’s head that had inspired many a boyhood fantasy of knights and castles and flashing swordfights. The familiarity should have been comforting. It wasn’t.

His head throbbed with a sudden, sharp pain, and he pressed his hands against the sides of his skull. “Nooo,” he moaned, not wanting to go any farther into the house, not wanting to see. Then his mother’s face floated into his line of vision, a pale oval framed by dark hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. The slight lines around her large, brown eyes crinkled with love and concern as she looked at him. They also held an unspoken message—he shouldn’t have come.

She reached for him, brushing his hair away from his forehead with the softest of touches. “Close your eyes, José Javier,” she whispered. He did.

He felt her hand on his chest, and then, with a vicious, sudden force, he was pushed back, back, back into a long black tunnel, away from his mother, away from everything. He scrambled for purchase, trying to climb out and save her from what he knew was coming. But his body kept sinking, farther and farther away.

A disembodied voice next to him, inside the tunnel, inside his head, whispered soothingly in his ear: “Turn your head, baby. Close your eyes.”

And then he heard his mother scream.

“SIR? SIR!”

He batted at the fingers that gripped his shoulder and groaned. Let go of me.

“Sir, please wake up.”

Let go.

“Wha—?” Blinking rapidly, Joe Lopez shook off the last net-like strands of the dream holding him under the waterline of consciousness. He scrubbed a hand across his face, opening his mouth wide for a loud, gaping yawn. Once he’d rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, the dream evaporated from his memory, and he finally managed to register the presence of one very flustered flight attendant. Her well-manicured hand was still on his arm.

“Sir, I’ll need you to put your seat back and tray table in its upright position, please. We’re about to land.” The woman straightened, tucking a stray lock of her sleek, blond hair behind her ear. The scowl on what would otherwise have been a pretty face told Joe she wasn’t happy with him.

“Sure. Yeah,” he muttered. He snapped the tray in place, hoping she’d hurry up and go away so the other passengers would quit staring at him. Thank God the flight to Los Angeles wasn’t full, so he had the entire row on his side of the plane to himself. Otherwise, he probably would have drooled on the people next to him. Or smacked them around. He wasn’t exactly the lightest and gentlest of sleepers, and he’d been down for the count as soon as the plane had leveled after takeoff.

Once the attendant had finally left, stopping two rows up to harass some other poor schmo who had endangered humanity by reclining his seat back half an inch, Joe turned his face toward the window. Tiny cars rode along seemingly endless ribbons of highway, matchstick-sized palm trees, and the sparkling blue waters of the Pacific lined with yellow sand beaches. Los Angeles. Man, he hated Los Angeles.

But this year, the National Association of Private Investigators was holding its annual conference in this godforsaken city, and he never missed a conference. He never missed anything related to his work—even when it meant he had to come to a hellhole like L.A. Most of the women he’d dated had told him he was “obsessed” with his work, and as a result, his relationships never lasted. They wanted more attention, more flowers, more something. And he was never able to give it to them. But there was always work, like a faithful dog.

He wasn’t obsessed. He just liked his job. He was the job. Lots of people he knew were the job. Unraveling cases was challenging, and nothing beat the feeling of taking a seemingly unsolvable puzzle and putting the pieces into neat, irrevocable order.

Okay, so sometimes really great sex beat it, but it had been awhile since he’d had anything or anyone approaching great.

Lucy Harrington, his last girlfriend, had told him he was “emotionally distant” and “completely closed off” right before she threw a dinner plate at his head and broke his brand-new high-definition TV set. That had not been great. And that had also been the last time he’d seen Lucy Harrington. Last he’d heard, she was engaged to some stockbroker from Carmel. He hoped they registered for plastic plates instead of china.

The plane dipped noticeably as the pilot hit an air pocket, and Joe’s stomach responded by doing a little tap dance that—if he hadn’t known better—he might have attributed to nerves. But of course it wasn’t. José Javier Lopez didn’t get “nerves.” It was just L.A. Maybe he was allergic to it. Because one little city was nothing to be scared of, unless you feared rank smog and a proliferation of brittle, unhappy people who’d gone to see their friendly neighborhood plastic surgeon so many times, they’d become wall-eyed.

Joe rested his forehead against the Plexiglas of the small, oval window next to his seat. So if he wasn’t scared, then why did he feel like he’d rather lop off his own head than get off that plane?

“Maybe,” Lucy Harrington said inside his head, “if you weren’t so out of touch with your emotions, you’d be able to talk about how you’re feeling, instead of repressing everything and watching baseball instead.”

Yeah, what do you know, Luce?

And for the record, basketball was his sport of choice. Anyone who’d been as interested as she had in becoming Mrs. Lucy Harrington Lopez should have known that.

What he wouldn’t give to be watching a game right now, with a cold six-pack and his dog Roadkill sitting next to him. But instead, he was minutes away from landing in Los Angeles. He turned away from the window in disgust. He’d hated the city for as long as he could remember, and for the life of him, he couldn’t remember exactly why.

Story of his life. He couldn’t remember a lot of things.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Fasten Seat Belt sign has been turned on,” a voice called over the airplane loudspeaker. “Please return to your seats. We are about to start our final descent into Los Angeles International Airport. Local time is 10:37 a.m.”

Joe’s hand gripped the armrest until his knuckles looked bloodless.

Man, he hated this city.

WITH A QUICK GLANCE over her shoulder, Emma Jensen Reese shifted her grocery bags, the heavy brown paper crumpling slightly under the pressure of her forearms. He was still behind her.

Emma hadn’t actually seen him close up, but she’d registered the baseball cap, baggy mid-length coat and penchant for whistling Sinatra. Was he dangerous? She didn’t know. At every intersection, she kept telling herself that he would turn this time, that it was all in her head, that he was just some random guy who lived in the area and also needed to go to the Trader Joe’s at ten o’clock at night because he needed eggs and had a craving for those chocolate raspberry jelly things they sold. But the thoughts didn’t keep her from worrying.

Maybe she was overdramatizing the situation, but he’d been walking behind her for five blocks now. In the dark. The thought made her instinctively quicken her pace down Third, the heels of her boots echoing on the pavement.

Her ears pricked up as the faint footsteps behind her sped up accordingly. Emma’s pulse followed suit.

Maybe she was in danger.

Ridiculous. She was being utterly, completely ridiculous. After all, she’d been walking in a straight line ever since she’d left the health food store, and Third wasn’t exactly one of the most deserted streets in Los Angeles. Three cars whipped by her in succession as if to illustrate the point. She would turn down that short alley a few feet away—the one that threaded between a couple of high-rises and ended within a block of her Hancock Park neighborhood—and everything would be all right. He’d keep right on going.

She turned.

A few seconds later, so did he.

The thin, shrill notes of someone whistling “All or Nothing at All” hung shrilly in the cool night air. They screeched down her spine like the chalk sometimes did on her blackboard when she wrote too fast.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Emma muttered to herself, the words keeping time with her ever-quickening steps. The decision to enter the alley hadn’t been one of her best. In a nutshell, she’d just acted like some clueless bimbo in a B-grade horror flick, and the person behind her had her just where he wanted her. And now she was going to die. She was going to die trapped in a horrible cliché.

Glancing back at him, Emma hugged the bags closer to her body, noting that he was still about fifty feet behind her. If she started to run, so would he.

Emma kept walking. Not yet. She wasn’t ready.

She should have driven, but nooooo. She’d caved to convenience and had bought a gas-electric hybrid car instead of a wholly electric model, and so she usually walked on most errands out of guilt. No matter how late at night.

A cool summer twilight breeze blew at her back, and she tossed her head frantically when her hair flew into her eyes. For crying out loud, some gang banging hip hop artist had been shot mere blocks from where she was right at this moment, and he’d had an entire entourage protecting him. She had a rape whistle and a pound of organic butter.

Emma glanced down at the bags she held. And some free-range eggs.

Her calves ached from walking too fast in her high-heeled boots, but she pushed herself further and faster. She would not die in that alley. She would not.

The faint notes of “My Way” floated on the air to sift through her hair and disappear on the evening breeze. Mother in heaven, he was closer now. Emma swept her gaze frantically across her surroundings, weighing her options. She could keep pretending she had no idea he was behind her and hope someone would stumble upon her and come to her aid. She could walk as quickly as possible through the rest of the alley and go directly to one of the big mansions on the next street. Or, she could drop the bags and run screaming back to the nearest well-lit commercial area, hoping she could beat her pursuer. The latter seemed like the best option—if she went up to a house and the inhabitants didn’t open the door, she was finished.

Choose.

The heel of her leather boot caught in a sidewalk crack, and her ankle buckled, causing her to lurch onto the carefully tended grass beside her.

She heard him laugh behind her, a low, rumbling, ominous sound.

An eternity later, she finally made it out of the alley, and she jogged to the nearest streetlight, basking in the glow of its warm yellow circle of light. People could see her. She was safe now.

And then she felt the breath of a stranger on the back of her neck, as someone behind her whistled “Strangers in the Night.”

That was it. The next level.

Emma dropped her bags, her groceries spilling and rolling onto the sidewalk at her feet. Screaming “Fire!” as she’d been taught in the free self-defense class on campus last semester, she threw her weight forward, running toward the front walkway of her house, just ahead. Something rippled in the darkness, in front of the fat little palm tree planted near the street, and she didn’t know whether it was a person, an animal or just her imagination. She prayed it was something that would save her. “Please,” she breathed.

The silk scarf she’d wrapped loosely around her neck slid smoothly across her skin and fell away—whether of its own accord or because someone had pulled it, she couldn’t say. Quelling the urge to look behind her, she kept running in her torturous heeled boots, scrabbling through her purse for that damned whistle on her key chain. She reached deep inside her for one last burst of energy, just enough to live through this…

Then she tripped.

Time slowed to a crawl as the ankle that had buckled earlier gave out once more. It was almost as if she were floating above her body, watching herself stumble, scream, fall. Watching her pursuer pull a Taser from the waistband of his grimy jeans. Watching herself scuttle backwards on her heels and elbows like a pathetically small and scared crab.

The moonlight glinted off the Taser above her. Attack. Immobilize. Isolate. The words of the self-defense instructor came back to her with stark clarity. The pavement cut into the palms of her hands. The sounds of cars whirring along the nearby streets and highways mingled with dance music and barking dogs. The breeze blew her hair into her eyes. And Emma waited, not moving, not blinking, for the man charging toward her to do all of the above.

His attack never came. He charged right past her, toward the squat trunk of the short, leafy palm tree in front of her home, several feet away. The darkness rippled again, and a second man erupted out of the tree’s shadow, chopping his hands so both thumbs hit either side of her would-be attacker’s wrist. The Taser flew into the air, landing harmlessly a few feet away from her. Emma scuttled sideways crab-style on her hands and heels until she could reach out and grasp it by its thick plastic handle. She wasn’t sure how to use it, but at least it was in her hand and not anyone else’s.

The two shadows circled each other slowly, one with his hands clenched into fists, and the other assuming a vague, martial arts-looking stance. The one with the fists—the Sinatra freak—swung wildly, and the other man curved his body into a bow, effectively dodging the blow. He followed defense with attack, delivering a well-controlled blow to the attacker’s temple with the back of his fist. A lightning-fast punch to the stomach, knee to the head and swirling roundhouse kick to the chest, and it was all over. Her former pursuer slumped to the ground, unconscious.

Emma zapped him with the Taser anyway. Or tried to. She thought she’d missed, but then the man’s body jerked upward and he went still. Whether he’d been intentionally following her or not, she had a great story for the next Take Back the Night rally on campus.

“Are you all right?” the other man asked her, his face obscured by the shadows. He held out a hand to her, and she grasped it, allowing him to pull her off the pavement to a standing position.

“I’m fine,” she gasped. “Thank you.” She glanced briefly at her pursuer, who lay spread-eagle on his back, groaning like a child.

“Get inside.”

Emma squinted into the darkness, wanting very much to get a look at the man who might have saved her. “Who are you?” she asked.

But all around her was darkness, and her rescuer was gone. A handful of dry leaves blew around her ankles in a crackling dance, and when she looked at the ground where her pursuer had fallen, she saw that he’d disappeared, too.

In the distance, she heard the sound of someone whistling, “Strangers in the Night.”