Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(61)

He shivered and waited. From time to time he looked up at the stars.

It happened sooner than he expected. He thought he might have to wait until midnight for her breather, but suddenly the door opened and she was there, standing in the yellow light, peering out into the darkness. At first he could not believe it had happened so soon, and he stared for a moment as if she were an apparition. Then he pressed a hand to the tree trunk and pulled himself to his feet. He had not thought about how to best approach her at this moment, how to make her aware of his presence without frightening her. He blew air through his teeth, just wanted to catch her attention. “Sssss!”

But it wasn’t loud enough. She remained in the doorway, kept scanning the parking lot. He took a step forward, felt a thorny branch against his neck, put out a hand to push it away.

Then a car door opened, the dome light dark. “Over here,” the man inside said, and blinked a flashlight on and off. He was sitting in a light-brown Bonneville, one of the seven cars that had already been in the lot when Huston arrived.

Annabel strode toward the man’s open door. Huston thought she appeared angry, walking with an adamant stride, leaning forward. But before she reached the car, the man pulled his door shut, then the passenger door popped open. Annabel altered her path, crossed in front of the car, bent down beside the open door. Huston heard her say, “All right, so what’s this about?”

The man’s response was muted and indecipherable. Annabel straightened, looked back toward Whispers, stood motionless for a few seconds. “This is bullshit,” she said. Then she faced the car again, climbed inside, and shut the door.

Huston retreated a bit deeper into the trees. He watched the car but could see only the silhouettes of their heads and shoulders. She did not move close to the driver, nor he to her. Over the next fifteen minutes, bits of their conversation were loud enough to reach Huston but only as dull intonations, mere sounds. He had no idea what was transpiring inside that car. More importantly, no idea about what to do when Annabel emerged from the car. If he revealed himself so as to catch her attention, the man in the car would see him too, would see a hooded figure calling out from the edge of the woods. But if he did not, Annabel would return to Whispers, in which case he would probably have to wait until the club closed for her to come back outside.

In the end, he decided that the best course of action was to wait. At two a.m. the customers would all leave, then the employees. So he should wait. He would sit and tremble and wait.

Annabel remained in the man’s car for approximately twenty minutes. Then suddenly the rear door of Whispers sprang open. The rectangle of yellow light was filled by the figure of a large man, his shoulders nearly as wide as the doorframe, arms thick with muscle. In his right hand, he held a baseball bat against his leg.

Now the driver’s door on the car in the lot popped open. His dome light did not come on. Huston looked back and forth from the two men, one standing and enveloped in light, the other seated in darkness. The man in the car said, “You need to go back inside, pardner.”

The man in the doorway started forward. The baseball bat swung back and forth beside his leg.

The man in the car slid out and stood up, turned on a powerful flashlight, and aimed it directly into the other man’s eyes. “This is state police business,” the man said. “And I am telling you to go back inside. Now.”

The man with the baseball bat stood motionless. Five seconds passed. Finally he took a step and a half backward, then turned, retreated inside, pulled shut the door. The other man slid inside the car again and softly closed his door.

Thomas Huston could not breathe. He could hear the sound of breathing coming from his mouth, one quick gasp after another, but he could get no air into his lungs. There was only blackness now, no oxygen, everything extinguished by the face of the man with the baseball bat, the voice of the man in the car. He had recognized both of them. And now, everything else except that knowledge was suffocated, stabbed out. Huston stumbled backward, back through the trees, falling against one and then another until he finally wheeled around, gasping for air, sucking in the blackness, plunging blindly through the branches. He could not breathe, could not think, could do nothing but plunge deeper and deeper into the woods while his chest ached as if stabbed again and again and again by the knife of recognition.





Forty-Two


With his car radio turned low, DeMarco could occasionally hear a particularly loud blast of rock music from inside Whispers, and it never failed to set his teeth on edge. More often, he felt the noise as a thrum of vibration on his skin, a recurring itch. He had the radio tuned to Erie’s NPR station in hopes that the soft-voiced host and the strains of Coltrane and Monk would lessen the unquiet he felt, the jitteriness that resulted from having to sit too long with empty hands and a sober mind. He had been watching the parking lot for nearly eighty minutes now, only a few minutes longer than Morgan and Carmichael had been inside, dressed like golfers fresh from nineteen holes. During that time, each trooper had made a visit to the men’s room to make a cell phone call to DeMarco. Bonnie remained at her station behind the bar, they reported, and displayed no signs of nervousness, no particular interest in anybody there. None of the customers bore any resemblance to Thomas Huston.

DeMarco could not have explained, had he been asked to do so, why he expected Huston to show up there tonight. Yet he felt certain of it. Somehow, this place or Huston’s relationship with Bonnie was integral to the slaughter at the Huston home. DeMarco knew it, Huston knew it, Bonnie knew it. And Huston was a creature of routine, a man who, like many, employed routine as a palliative, a damp blanket laid over the fires within. He had spent several Thursday nights in a row in the same place Bonnie had, even the one Thursday night neither had shown up at Whispers—this, DeMarco knew in his gut. Then Claire, Tommy, Alyssa, and Ryan had been murdered, and Huston had been spotted wandering through the dawn in a daze. Now it was Thursday night again. Where else would Huston go, distraught as he surely was, consumed by either guilt or rage?