The Lonely Mile(63)
“Yes,” she muttered, now speaking in a near-whisper. “I think this will have to do.”
She rotated her arm smoothly, shifting the barrel of her weapon just a couple of inches until it now pointed directly at a surprised Martin Krall.
“What do you think you’re—”
She fired, blowing his head apart in a fine crimson stew of blood, brain tissue, and pulverized bone.
CHAPTER 55
May 28, 4:21 p.m.
THE ROAR WAS DEAFENING, eclipsing the noise of the storm and effectively drowning out Carli’s scream. The spray of blood from the murdered I-90 Killer’s head covered her face and her clothing, tinting her in a reddish hue. She thrashed on her bed in a panic, trying desperately to escape but unable, anchored to the spot by the unyielding handcuffs.
Before Krall’s murdered body had hit the floor, Agent Canfield rotated the gun and once again brought it to bear on Bill Ferguson. The entire bloody incident had taken no more than a half-second’s time and Bill now realized, too late, that he had missed what would likely be his only opportunity to take her by surprise and overpower her. In his shock and disbelief at what he was seeing, he had stood rooted to the spot upon which he was now going to die.
He had taken a single, reflexive step backward when Canfield fired her gun, bringing his hands together in front of his face in a warding-off gesture—another reflexive action, which would have been completely ineffective had the gun been pointed at him—and now Canfield barked, “Get your hands above your head, now!”
Bill obeyed, and when he did, the knuckles of his right hand grazed something sharp directly over his head. He felt a stinging sensation and yelped, glancing upward and seeing that he had struck a pair of wooden crossbeams that had been added in an X pattern between the two-by-six studs supporting the first floor above their heads. Like everything else in the house, the support struts needed maintenance badly.
One of the supports had come loose, hanging off one side of the two-by-sixes. When Bill raised his hands he’d scraped it and splinters dug into the back of his hand. He cried out, shaking his hand.
Canfield screamed, “Get your hands in the air!”
Bill raised his hand again, ignoring the throbbing in his knuckles, well aware that a couple of splinters would soon be the least of his problems. Angela Canfield’s entire body was shaking, and sweat was pouring off her. It ran down her face. Her moment of relative calm had passed, and she was clearly feeling the pressure of this life-and-death situation. Bill realized he was lucky she hadn’t shot him already.
Carli lay panting and moaning on the bed a few feet to Bill’s left, trying desperately to brush the blood off her face and succeeding only in smearing it around. He tried to ignore her. The only way he could help her now was by slowing things down, by attempting to gain an extra couple of minutes for them. If he could manage that, he would then try for a couple more in hopes of figuring some way out of this mess.
Canfield glanced between Bill and Carli, back and forth, muttering to herself under her breath. It sounded to Bill like she was saying, “This could work.” She was still planning, strategizing, looking for a way out, and it seemed obvious to Bill she had decided upon one.
Bill glanced down at Martin Krall’s dead body lying on the floor at the foot of Carli’s bed and nearly puked. The man’s head had been blown apart. His ruined skull was unrecognizable except in the most basic way as a human cranium. Bill knew he needed to do something fast to avoid him and Carli suffering a similar fate. But what?
“Agent Canfield,” he said. “Angela.” He kept his voice low and, he hoped, unthreatening, although the irony of trying to appear unthreatening when she was the one holding the gun was inescapable. “As a female yourself, how could you get involved in something like this? You’re taking young women, still girls, and dooming them to a life of sexual slavery, wrenching them away from their families, forcing them into a life of torture—”
“You’d be surprised at what you can survive if you don’t have a choice,” she said. She seemed marginally calmer, a little more under control, but still her glassy eyes glittered dangerously, a frightening testament to the strain she was operating under. “I’m a living, breathing example of that.”
“What happened to you, Angela?” Bill could see she wanted to explain herself to him. He wasn’t sure why, perhaps because of the emotional bond they had shared last night, but the reason didn’t matter. Talking was good. If she was talking, she wasn’t shooting. His arms were tiring from the strain of holding them up near the rafters, but he concentrated on keeping them high. Lowering them would force another show of aggression from Canfield, and that was exactly what he wanted to avoid.
“What happened to me?” She blinked and paused, either considering whether she wanted to answer the question or remembering. “My earliest memories are of my mother’s boyfriend creeping into my bedroom at night, raising my nightgown to my neck and pulling down my underwear. ‘Playing our secret games,’ he called it. Hardly a night went by that we didn’t ‘play our secret games.’
“I was maybe ten years old at the time the abuse started,” she said. “He used toys and candy to buy my silence, and later, when I got older, he graduated to threats and intimidation. But what he didn’t realize was that I didn’t want to tell anyone. I was ashamed and humiliated. All I wanted was for it to stop, for it all to go away. But it never did, until the day he finally went to prison—for something else, by the way—and got what was coming to him.”