Later(58)

“Shit,” she whispered. “Oh, shit.” She flipped through some more. They were unspeakable. She closed the folder. “It’s her.”

“Who?”

“Maddie. His wife. Guess she didn’t run off after all.”

Marsden was still outside in the library, but looking away from us. The back of his head was a ruin, like the left side of Therriault’s had been, but I barely noticed. There are worse things than bullet wounds, a little something I found out that evening.

“They tortured her to death,” I said.

“Yes, and had fun while they were doing it. Look at those big smiles. You still sorry I killed him?”

“You didn’t kill him because of what he did to his wife,” I said. “You didn’t know about that. You killed him because of the dope.”

She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, and to her it probably didn’t. She looked out of the panic room, where he came to look at his awful pictures, and across the library to the upstairs hall. “Is he still there?”

“Yes. In the doorway.”

“At first he said there weren’t any pills, but I knew he was lying. Then he said there were a lot. A lot!”

“Maybe he was lying when he said that. He could, because he wasn’t dead yet.”

“But he told you they were in the panic room! He was already dead then!”

“He didn’t say how many.” I asked Marsden, “That’s all you’ve got?”

“That’s all,” he said. His voice was starting to drift.

“You told her you had a lot!”

He shrugged his bloody shoulders. “As long as she believed I had what she wanted, I thought she’d keep me alive.”

“But that tip she heard about your getting a big private shipment—”

“Just bullshit,” he said. “There’s a lot of bullshit in this business. People say all sorts of shit just to hear themselves talk.”

Liz shook her head when I told her what he’d said, not believing it. Not wanting to believe it because if she did, it meant all her west coast plans fell down. It meant she’d been conned.

“He’s hiding something,” she insisted. “Somehow. Somewhere. Ask him again where the rest of them are.”

I opened my mouth to say that if there were more he would have told me already. Then—probably because the terrible pictures had slapped a dazed part of me awake—I had an idea. Maybe I could do some conning of my own, because she was certainly ready to be conned. If it worked, I might be able to get away from her without whistling up a demon.

She grabbed my shoulders and gave me a shake. “Ask him, I said!”

So I did. “Where’s the rest of the dope, Mr. Marsden?”

“I told you, that’s all there is.” His voice was fading, fading. “I keep a few on hand for Maria, but she’s in the Bahamas. Bimini.”

“Oh, okay. That’s more like it.” I pointed to the shelves of canned goods. “See the cans of spaghetti on the top shelf?” There was no way she could miss them, there had to be at least thirty. Donnie Bigs must have really loved his Franco-American. “He said he hid some in those—not Oxy, they’re something else.”

She could have dragged me with her, but I was thinking there was a good chance she’d be too eager, and I was right. She ran to the shelves of canned goods. I waited until she was standing on her tiptoes and reaching up. Then I bolted out of the panic room and across the library. I wish I’d remembered to shut the door, but I didn’t. Marsden was standing there and he looked solid, but I ran right through him. There was a moment of freezing cold, and my mouth filled with an oily taste I think was pepperoni. Then I was sprinting for the stairs.

There was a clatter of falling cans from behind me. “Get back here, Jamie! Get back!”

She came after me. I could hear her. I made it to where those stairs swooped down, and looked over my shoulder. That was a mistake. I tripped. Out of other options, I pursed my lips to whistle, but I couldn’t do anything but huff air. My mouth and lips were too dry. So I screamed instead.

“THERRIAULT!”

I started to crawl down the stairs headfirst with my hair in my eyes, but she grabbed my ankle.

“THERRIAULT, HELP ME! GET HER OFF ME!”

Suddenly everything—not just the balcony, not just the stairs, but all of the space above the great room and the conversation pit—filled with white light. I was looking back at Liz when it happened, and I squinted against the glare, all but blinded. It was coming from that tall mirror, and more was pouring out of the mirror on the other side of the balcony.

Liz’s grip loosened. I grabbed one of the slate stairs and yanked on it as hard as I could. Down I went on my belly, like a kid on the world’s bumpiest toboggan ride. I came to a stop about a quarter of the way down. Behind me, Liz was shrieking. I looked between my arm and my side, because of my position seeing her upside down. She was standing in front of the mirror. I don’t know exactly what she saw, and that’s good, because I might never have slept again. The light was enough—that brilliant no-color light that came glaring out of the mirror like a solar flare.

The deadlight.

Then I saw—I think I saw—a hand come out of the mirror and seize Liz by the neck. It yanked her against the glass and I heard it crack. She continued to shriek.