The Inn - James Patterson Page 0,57
go down, waiting until she could see the tension in his body shift as he anticipated her surrender. That’s when she struck, batting the gun aside, punching out as hard as she could. She was aiming for his balls but went a little high; her knuckles collided with a belt worn low, but the force was enough to shock him, double him over. She turned and felt his arms come around her and now the gun was in both their hands, the aim wavering over the walls, the ceiling. Malone slammed into them, wrenching the man’s head back so that Susan could grab the weapon. Her mind was a constant hammering of half-formed thoughts, panic she had once been taught to keep at bay now unleashed as soon as it was triggered.
How many are there?
Is anyone in the house already dead?
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
SUSAN SWUNG THE pistol, tried to pick out the shape of the balaclava she had glimpsed in the dark, but before her was a tangle of shapes as Malone and the intruder wrestled. They crashed into the dining-room table, crushing a book-shelf, spilling books and ornaments. Someone got free—she heard the crunch of bones and a gasp of pain, and her heart sank as a silhouette appeared in the doorway, not Malone but a bigger, stronger man who glanced back as he headed down the hall.
“Stop!” Susan pointed the gun, but he was already gone. “Stop right now!”
He was in the kitchen. Susan ran and pushed the swinging door open, and almost immediately it swung back and hit her awkwardly, the shock enough to jolt the gun from her hands. His hands were on her wrists as he dragged her into the dark, and she twisted, planted a foot in his gut, and wrenched herself free. The knife block tumbled under her hands, spilling blades, but there was no time to get them. She grabbed a pot on the stove, turned, swung, and landed a solid blow to the side of a face. She heard what sounded like a tooth rattling as it hit the floor.
He was outnumbered and outmaneuvered and he knew it. Before Malone was fully through the door, Susan saw the shape of the intruder skirting past him. Susan and Malone rushed to the doorway in time to see the man run up the stairs, a desperate move, the intruder trying to hide in the house in the dark. He reached the second floor, and Susan’s eyes were flooded with visions of who lay there sleeping and what he could do to them—stab them in their beds, bash their heads in, take them hostage. For a split second she could see all the atrocities she had witnessed over the course of her career, the howling mouths of the dead frozen, protesting their last violent seconds, in beds, in doorways, hanging over banisters, trying to claw their way out to escape.
Susan didn’t make it to the second step. As the man reached the top of the staircase, Neddy Ives’s door slammed open with tremendous force and smacked the intruder with as much power and desperation as he was using to get away. The collision seemed to shake the house.
Susan and Malone parted as the unconscious man tumbled down the stairs between them, a rag doll who came to a twisted stop at their feet.
Neddy Ives surveyed his work for a moment, gripping the door, his eyes hollow in the dim moonlight spilling in the second-floor window.
“Would you mind keeping it down?” he said quietly. “It’s late.”
Malone and Susan watched as he went back inside his room and closed his door.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
I SAW THE flashing red ambulance lights from a long way off, and I slammed my foot down on the accelerator even before I could tell they were at the Inn. Having dozed off almost as soon as we left Gloucester’s harbor, Effie jerked awake in her seat, like a robot suddenly switched to standby mode.
Almost all of the crew was on the porch in the eerie blue predawn, coats or blankets pulled around their shoulders, watching as two men were loaded into ambulances. Doc Simeon was briefing two paramedics, his hands covered to the wrists in blood. I leaped out of the car and silently counted my people like a parent counting kids, my heart hammering in my chest.
On the stretcher, a man I recognized from Cline’s house was sucking oxygen and howling with pain, one knee swathed in thick bandages already soaked through with blood.