Six Geese A-Slaying(77)

He turned the camera on and began pressing buttons. His eyes kept flicking down to the camera’s display screen and then back to me. I deduced that he was scanning the photos.

Then he stopped.

“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty incriminating shot, this one. But the great thing about digital cameras is that you can delete anything you like, and no one the wiser.”

He pressed more buttons. Deleting his way through the rest of the shots, no doubt. Then he nodded, turned the camera off, and stuck it into his pocket.

“Now pick him up,” he said.

“Rob?” I said. “He shouldn’t be moved. He could have a concussion.”

“Yeah,” he said, hefting a long Maglite in his left hand. “I was aiming for a concussion. If you don’t want to pick him up, I could whack him on the head another couple of times and we’ll just leave him there.”

I decided picking Rob up was the better option. I bent down and found Spike there, licking Rob’s head.

“Damn,” Werzel said. “If the circumstances were different, I could do one of those great tearjerker stories. Faithful hound licking the blood off his fallen master’s wound.”

Blood? Yes, I could see it now. Just a trickle, that Spike was licking up eagerly. I decided not to explain that it wasn’t either devotion or savagery on Spike’s part—he just liked the salty taste. He’d have licked the wounds of a mortal enemy—or Rob’s face after a sweaty tennis match—with equal fervor. Werzel would find that all too hilarious.

Spike growled a little when I picked Rob up.

“Chill, Spike,” I said.

“Put him on the cart,” Werzel said.

I draped Rob carefully over the cleaner’s cart. He groaned slightly.

“Okay, roll him that way,” Werzel said.

I thought of saying something melodramatic like “You’ll never get away with this,” but I didn’t like the twitchy sound of his voice. I concentrated on going as slowly as I could without ticking him off. Slowly was better for Rob’s head, and also maximized our chances of running into someone who might help.

But the corridors we rolled through remained disappointingly empty. I realized that we were heading for the service elevator. Spike was trailing behind us.

“Why are you kidnapping us?” I asked. I didn’t shout, but I tried to project from the diaphragm, the way Michael was always trying to teach his theater students.

“Shut up and keep pushing,” Werzel said. “There’s room for two on that damned cart.”

I shut up. Not talking to Werzel made it easier for me to concentrate on coming up with an escape plan. Unfortunately, while I could come up with several different ways I could escape, I hadn’t yet thought of any way for us to escape. And much as I tried to convince myself that if I escaped and ran for help, Werzel wouldn’t dare hurt Rob, I didn’t believe it. Werzel had already killed at least once—what did he have to lose?

Dunsany Hall was utterly and depressingly empty. The students had long since gone home for the holidays, of course, but you’d think at least one of Michael’s colleagues would be dropping by to check on his e-mail or something. We rolled through empty corridors until we reached the freight elevator. No one stumbled on us during the long wait for the ancient machinery to crank its way up to our floor.

“Roll him in,” Werzel said, gesturing with the gun. “And kick the mutt out,” he added, as Spike tried to follow me.

“And here I thought you were shocked when Ralph Doleson kicked Spike,” I said, as I reached down to pick Spike up. “You weren’t shocked by what he did—you were shocked to see him. And—ouch!”

Predictably, Spike bit me, and then scampered off the way we’d come.

“Good riddance,” Werzel said.

“You’re not afraid he’ll run downstairs and warn people that there’s something wrong?” I said.

Werzel seemed to find that funny. He’d seen Spike in action enough to know that a Lassie-style rescue wasn’t too probable. Ah, well. Surely we’d see someone once we got outside.

But when the elevator doors opened and we rolled out onto the loading dock, I realized that between the gathering darkness and the steady snowfall, I could hardly see ten feet. And that no sane person would be lurking in the alley behind the Drama Department on a night like this. And more immediately, that my coat was still lying beside my purse on the floor of the corridor upstairs, where I’d dropped them when I’d found Rob.

“Over there,” Werzel said. He gestured with the Maglite. “The blue Subaru.” Yeah, I could have guessed that—it was the only vehicle in sight.