The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(91)

“What are you doing, Vincent?” Madison asked him.

She examined the circling shadows. Was it safer to keep Vincent there when as many as four men were searching for him? Should she bundle him into her car and just drive him to the precinct?

“What are you doing?” she whispered again, trying to keep the conversation going and aware of every noise around them.

“Over and over,” Vincent replied in a similar whisper, his reedy voice barely carrying the words.

“What’s over and over?”

“Ronald said, ‘Hit.’”

“He did?”

The weak pool of light from Madison’s flashlight danced on the bottom of the fresh pit.

“What else did Ronald say?”

Ronald lay inside a morgue’s drawer and wouldn’t say anything to anyone anymore, and Madison felt like a thief prying nuggets of gold from this man who couldn’t begin to grasp that the only person who had cared for him in this world had been murdered trying to protect him.

“What else did he say?” she repeated.

“The trail is the wall,” Vincent said, digging and patting the sides of the hole.

What?

“The trail? What trail, Vincent?”

He stopped and raised his muddy right hand into the beam of light. The index finger traced a line in the air between them.

“The trail,” he said.

And Madison saw his bare cell and the intricate lines that traversed every inch of wall that he could reach.

“The drawings on your walls? Is it the trail?”

She didn’t quite understand what it meant or even if it meant anything at all. “What trail? Where does it go?”

Vincent dug and patted, dug and patted, with a pattern of repeating gestures. He spoke without looking up. “It’s not safe. Over and over.”

The icy coldness from the damp earth reached into Madison’s bones. She shifted on the ground but stayed close to the slight man.

Had Ronald told him to hit David Quinn over and over? Was that how the boy had died?

The snap of a dry branch rang out only yards away. Madison fumbled with the flashlight, turned it off, and they were instantly wrapped in darkness. Even the glimmers from the blaze had all but gone.

She stretched out her hand and touched Vincent’s shoulder. There he was. He stiffened but did not shrink from her touch. She sidled up close to him and whispered: “It’s not safe, Vincent, like Ronald said. It’s not safe right now. Don’t make a sound. I will protect you.”

They were ridiculous, inadequate words and fell like stones from her lips.

Madison crouched next to Vincent: her left arm went around his bony shoulders, her right in front of her holding her piece. The muzzle tracked the muffled sounds approaching them. Someone walked lightly between the trees; someone placed his feet carefully and avoided making too much noise.

Madison thought of the dead eyes in the little window and how the man hadn’t blinked when she had pointed her gun at him.

Vincent was a taut ball of wire tucked in by her side, vibrating with fear. The beams of two flashlights blinked through the bushes and then appeared as they crossed and parted on the uneven ground, suspended in the gloom.

Two men. Not cops. Not calling out to Vincent or to anyone else. Not here to serve and protect.

If it came to it that she could aim at one of the lights, but chances were their other hands were holding pieces, and her muzzle flash would tell them where they were.

The men approached slowly and steadily, a gap of eight feet now between them. Their slender light beams crawled over the ground and the roots of the evergreens; sometimes they made a quick pass at waist height.

They made hardly any noise at all, as if they had been absorbed by the chilly air that stank of smoke and the trailing fingers of the flashlights were all that was left of them.

Vincent whimpered. It was a tiny bubble of sound that resonated like a gunshot in Madison’s ear.

The beams stopped where they were, about six feet away from Madison, and she took aim at the closest. She had hoped that the gap between them and the men would be enough for her to keep herself and Vincent Foley safe, but her chances were getting slimmer by the second. If they were discovered, all she had going for her was precision and speed. Shoot at the light. If they see you, shoot first one, then the other. Those two seconds are all you can count on.

And even then the men would probably get a few shots off themselves.

A burst of sounds and lights from the edge of the lawn startled Madison. People calling out, hollering, and coming closer: staffers, cops, all looking for the missing patient. Had they found the dead nurse yet?

The two men had also heard them and stepped closer, closing the gap and walking faster, bearing straight down on Madison and Vincent. Stealth was not necessary anymore now that the noise from the search party covered their footsteps.