This most perfect day of his life became even better.
“Come out of there,” he commanded.
“No.”
He trained the gun on her face. “No isn’t an option.”
The little bitch defied him and sat down on the floor of the pantry.
He was going to kill her. He had no compunctions about killing children. He’d done it before, if only a couple times. He wasn’t concerned about what his crew would say, because they wouldn’t care that he offed the little bitch. They wouldn’t report him to anyone. Doing so would only get them executed by even more ruthless agents of the shadow state. They all knew what the stakes were here, knew what was required of them, and if Falkirk killed her, that was just one less task for them.
However, he didn’t want to kill her in the pantry. He needed to get her out of there, secure her to a chair at the breakfast table, where she would wait for her mother and Pellafino to wake. He wanted the girl to watch while he killed Michelle and Duke, wanted her to understand that she had snarked the wrong man. He was a killer of demigods, a man with infinite worlds at his disposal, who could be shot but not stopped, who felt no pain anymore. He had lived a life of pain from an early age, emotional pain. He’d been shit on by everyone: his mother dying on him, his lust-crazed father selling him out for a sexpot second wife, leaving him with no inheritance. To claw his way up in the shadow state and the halls of the überwealthy, he had licked boots and kissed asses and humiliated himself in ten thousand ways, but now those days were done. He had the key now, the only remaining key in this timeline, and it made him free, made him the master of his fate and hers.
He holstered the gun and went into the pantry and shouted at her to get to her feet. She tried to curl up like a pill bug, so he cuffed her hard alongside the head, cuffed her again. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, screaming, out of the closet, into the kitchen. She flailed at him vigorously, without effect. He twisted the fistful of hair as though to tear it out by the roots, until her scream became as thin as an electronic squeal. She so infuriated him that he wanted to forget about securing her in a chair to witness her mother’s murder, wanted to deal with her now, put a foot in her face, stomp that smart mouth so she’d never be able to smirk again.
91
Jeffy ricocheted from the Suavidad Beach where Amity was long dead, back to the town in which she was still alive, where she had better be alive, because the alternative wasn’t something that he could handle. He didn’t care that there were many parallel worlds in which his daughter remained breathing and vital even if she proved to be dead here, because this was the girl he’d loved for more than eleven years. He could love other versions of her—How could he not?—but in the thousands of days of their shared lives, he and this Amity laughed at the same things, sorrowed at the same things, weathered precisely the same vicissitudes of life, and no other Amity could be exactly like the one who’d filled his heart for more than a decade. She was the best thing that ever happened to him. Another Amity, no matter how nearly identical she might be to the one he raised, would not be his Amity. The loss of her would be real and devastating. Having failed her, he would dwell in despair all the remaining days of his life, this one life of many, this only life that mattered to him.
When he and Ed arrived in the master bedroom of the Pellafino house, the air was clean, as if the place hadn’t been attacked with gas. He half wondered if the key screwed up and delivered them to the wrong timeline. The silence was a relief from the ear-skewering squeal of the alarm in the other world, but such quiet was also a worry because from it he inevitably inferred that Falkirk’s work here was already concluded, with no one left to rescue.
Ed whispered, “Shotgun.”
As Jeffy handed over the weapon, men laughed somewhere on the second floor, and another man, much closer, called out, “Canker, Yessman—here, now!”
92
With Vince Canker and Roy Yessman, Lucas Blackridge searched the house, bottom to top, though there was no point to it. The gas had been introduced at such high velocity, with so many pounds of pressure behind it, that no one could have had time to flee the kitchen other than with a key that gave him access to the Everett Highways. Besides, there would have been no refuge upstairs, where the gas would have penetrated every corner at most four seconds after the ground-floor rooms were flooded.
He suspected Falkirk just wanted a few minutes alone with the unconscious woman because she was something of a looker. Blackridge knew his boss to be an arrogant ass, knew he hated women in general and pretty women in particular, and suspected him of being a pervert who liked to inflict pain on them. An unconscious woman wouldn’t give Falkirk the pleasure of a response to what torment he visited on her body. But maybe he intended to do the damage while she slept and have the gratification of her agony when she woke.
Blackridge had often considered arranging a fatal accident for Falkirk, with an eye toward perhaps moving into his position after the memorial service. However, the sonofabitch was well connected, and getting away with a disguised assassination would not be easy. In his present position with this cockamamie project, he was paid four times what he would have received anywhere else, and he didn’t want to wind up back in a civilian police department working more for the pension than for the salary.
They gave the creep ten minutes with the Coltrane woman and sp
eculated among themselves what atrocity he might commit with her.
At the back of the house, as they were ready to turn around and go downstairs, Vince Canker decided he needed to take a piss, and he went into the upstairs hall bath to relieve himself. The urge was apparently communicable, because Yessman decided to wait for his turn in the facilities.
Blackridge continued toward the front of the house. As he drew near the stairs, he heard a sudden insufflation of air. There were no open windows on the second floor, and the sound, though muffled, seemed akin to the whoosh that always accompanied transit between timelines. He thought it might have come from beyond the open door to his left.
At the back of the house, Canker and Yessman laughed, being the type who found nothing funnier than bathroom humor.
Blackridge called out, “Canker, Yessman—here, now!”
He hurried into the master bedroom, drawing his pistol as he crossed the threshold, and there was Jeffrey Coltrane, incoming from elsewhere. On arrival, he must have lurched into this timeline and stumbled, which sometimes happened. Having dropped his weapon, he was bending down to retrieve it.
Blackridge said, “Don’t touch it.”
93
The guy rushed through the open door as Jeffrey pretended to have dropped the pistol. The thug was professional and quick and ready and not stupid, so he realized at once that he made a mistake by assuming his quarry was a milquetoast dealer in antiques and an eccentric physicist with no more street smarts than any tenured Harvard professor. He began to turn his head to the right, but had no time to dodge the blow. Ed stood behind the door, shotgun raised high, and he brought the butt plate of the stock down hard on the gunman’s head. Skin split, bone cracked, blood flowed, and the man folded to the floor as if he were wet origami.
The laughing men were still in high humor as they approached along the second-floor hall, evidently unaware that the first man had summoned them to action. Before they appeared in the doorway, screams rose from downstairs. The voice was female, shrill with as much anger as terror. Amity.
94
He was going to kill her.