Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(9)

She shakes away the pain and leaps to her feet and sees the man. The Tall Man in the black suit. Twenty yards away, he observes her with his head cocked curiously, and then he begins to walk—and then run, his long arms slashing the air—toward her.

She departs this place, her home, bounding off into the trees. The snow whirls around her. It is as though she is entering a cloud—with vaporous edges that thicken into a cottony tangle out of which occasionally appear windows that glow like ball lightning and tall pine forests as dark as thunderheads. Into their cover she hurries.





Chapter 3



MIRIAM WAKES EARLY and pulls on her jeans and a thermal and goes to the living room window. Her hair is as black and ragged as a crow’s wings. Her face is as sharply angled as her body, as if honed to an edge, made to cut through things. She is in her late thirties, her age evident only in the hardness of her expression. In the half light, the tall, thick-waisted Douglas firs are swaying, bending, and creaking with the wind. The cracks around the windows and the front door emit the hollow tones that come from blowing across bottle tops.

Next to the cabin, a short clearing in the shape of a half-moon—fireweed, Indian paintbrush, moss, and stone. Her truck, an old black-and-silver Ramcharger, sits in the cinder driveway that cuts through the meadow and into the woods. It would take someone less than a minute to rush from the trees to her porch, and she keeps her eyes on the shadows between them.

Something is out there. She can feel it in the same way worms and toads can a storm, the changing air pressure making them squirm to the surface of their muddy burrows. She wouldn’t be alive today if not for her heightened senses, her ability to know. Her eyes are narrowed and her ears seem to prick forward.

Ten minutes pass like this, and then the morning begins to catch up with her and she withdraws from the window and heads down the hall to the kitchen to brew some coffee. If something is coming, she might as well be awake for it.

She doesn’t flip on the light when she enters the kitchen. The single window—looking out into the woods, much closer here, the white trunks of cottonwoods like bony teeth grinning across the glass—provides enough light. Beneath it, an L-shaped counter bends around the room, the Formica a spotted gray made to look like granite. It is interrupted by a four-burner stove and a deep-bellied sink next to which squats her coffeemaker. She grinds the beans and measures out the water, and while the pot gurgles and pops, she pulls open the silverware drawer and reaches past the knives and forks to withdraw something a little sharper still, a Glock 21, one of several weapons stashed throughout the cabin, this one a .45-caliber pistol with thirteen hollow-point rounds loaded in the magazine.

She tucks the Glock into the waistband at the small of her back. The sun is rising and the shadows are receding from the cabin, shrinking into its corners, when she splashes full her mug and returns to the living room. She stops so suddenly her coffee waves over the lip of the mug and scalds her fingers. The front door has a frosted oval of glass cut into it, and it is presently darkened by the shape of what could be a boy or could be a man, so diminutive is its shadow.

The wind is gusting. Her coffee is steaming. She sets the mug down on an end table and moves across the room, toward the door, depressing her bare feet slowly so as not to bring a creak from the wide-board flooring. She reaches for the door handle and a blue spark of electricity snaps at her when she lays a hand on it. She does not undo the lock, does not turn the handle, but lets her hand rest there and leans against it as if to buttress the door.

“Leave me alone, Puck,” she says, her voice loud enough to carry through the glass.

The shadow does not respond.

“I don’t want any part of it.”

“We need you.” She has always hated his voice, uneven and shrill, like a poorly cut flute. “Open the door.”

“Go away. Get the f*ck away from me.”

“We need you.” The wind gathers strength. She can feel it breathing around the door, a taste of snow in it maybe, with winter coming that much earlier at five thousand feet. “We want you.”

She mouths the word: Fuck. She thumps her forehead softly against the wall, snaps the deadbolt, and throws open the door. A cold wind envelops her. Her hair lifts from her shoulders while behind her a newspaper on the coffee table flutters its pages.

On the porch stands a small, muscular man, his feet apart, his hands at his sides. He wears a tight black T-shirt tucked into dark blue jeans. His peroxide hair—so blond, almost white—has been gelled back in a carefully messy way. This is Jonathan Puck. He is smiling at her, chewing gum. He raises his right hand in greeting, the pinky and ring finger missing from it, replaced by nubs of creamy scar tissue that she knows match the claw marks hidden beneath his clothes, along his back and chest mostly, as if he is riddled with worms. She knows because she is responsible for them.

“Come any closer, you’ll lose the rest of them.”

His hand drops. His smile trembles a little before growing wider. “I smell coffee.” His nostrils flare. “Aren’t you going to invite me in for a nice cup?”

“No.”

“I would love some coffee.” He snaps his gum. “Why don’t you let me in, dear?”

“No. I said leave me alone.”

He lets his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “Fair enough. I am the uninvited solicitor. We’ll talk here.”