The Forbidden Door Page 19

FOR A MOMENT, Ivan Petro is a child again, shaking with pain, cowering in the shadow of his father, gagging on the refluxed acid that burns up his throat and forms a bitter pool in his mouth, as it had so often during those years lived in nervous expectation of the old man’s violence. Ivan is too weak to run, too confused to hide, clenching his jaws to keep from expressing the raw ferocity of his hatred, which will only earn him more hard slaps, more punches, more cruel pinches.

He tries to swallow, but he can’t, so he hangs his head and lets the acid drool from his mouth into his lap. When he raises his head, he thinks their house is on fire, and he is bewildered as to the cause of this disaster. Then he realizes that he’s a grown man who has put the things of childhood far behind him. He is sitting in a vehicle, his wrists zip-tied to the steering wheel, and the truth of time and place returns to him.

He turns his head to his left. She’s standing a few feet from the missing window, her face reflecting the firelight from the south slope, that perfect face radiant like the face of a goddess, one eye brown, the other blue.

His speech is thick at first. “Your eyes are two colors. You lost a contact. I know which is true. Blue is true. Jane Hawk’s eyes are blue.”

“And you’re Ivan Petro.”

“You took my wallet.”

She tosses the wallet through the open window. It strikes his face and falls into the stomach acid on his pants.

The air smells of smoke. There’s a haze of it in the Rover. Leaf fires and weed fires burn low throughout the glen.

“Where did you first make me?” she asks.

Because his mind isn’t yet as clear as it needs to be, he says, “Placerville. You came out of some market with a deli bag.”

“Where is it?” she asks.

“Placerville? You know where it is. You’ve been there.”

“Don’t jerk me around. Time’s running out. Where did you plant the transponder?”

He shouldn’t have mentioned Placerville. “You were sleeping, so I put it up your pretty ass.”

She raises a pistol, a Heckler, and points it at his face.

He smiles scornfully. “You think I buy that crap about how you’re a cold-blooded killer? Spare me your evil eye.”

“I’ll kill a hundred of you to save my boy.”

“He’s dead already. They filmed it for you. Slit his belly open and let him scream to death.”

She only stares at Ivan. One blue, one brown, plus the round black eye of the gun muzzle.

A bead of sweat passes between his eyes and down his nose.

She lowers the pistol. “You’re parked in dead leaves. Fire under the gas tank soon. Maybe it’ll do the job for me.”

The engine isn’t running. She switched it off. Ivan can drive with his hands bound to the steering wheel, but even if she didn’t take the electronic key, he can’t reach the push-button ignition or the emergency-brake release.

His pistol is still on the passenger seat, where he dropped it.

He wheezes as if the smoke has gathered in his lungs. He fakes a coughing fit while he strains to strip the teeth of the zip-tie on his right wrist, which is cinched low on the steering wheel, not in her line of sight. It’s a ratchet latch; straining against it draws it tighter; it can’t be loosened once snug; it can only be cut. He coughs and strains nonetheless, because his wrists are as thick as ankles, and he is 275 pounds of hard-trained muscle and bone, and his hatred for this bitch is more intense than ever it was for his father. No power on Earth is greater than hatred, for it can destroy nations and fuel genocides in which millions die. He is empowered by hatred so virulent and implacable that no binding can restrain him.

She moves back a step or two. “The transponder. Quick now. Or I’ll go search for it myself, leave you to burn.”

He can’t pretend to be racked by coughing forever. Continuing to strain against the zip-tie, he buys time by telling her what she wants to know. “The kid hasn’t been killed, not even been found yet.”

“Then maybe you have a chance.”

“Transponder’s attached with epoxy. Can’t remove it.”

“If you want to live, tell me true.”

“True. You’ve got to hammer. Hammer it apart.”

The white-hot pain in his right hand now exceeds that in his left, the plastic tie cutting into his flesh, his fingers slick with blood. But he thrives on pain, eats it and is nourished by it; he has grown from child to man on a diet of pain.

“It’s in the back wheel well. Passenger side.”

“Who’ve you told about my Explorer, the license number?”

“No one. Those bastard poachers would take you, take all the credit, and keep me down.”

He can smell his hot blood dripping from his hand. A blackness pulses around the perimeter of his vision. The pain is so terrible that it brings into his throat another flood of bitter acid, which he swallows hard to repress.

“What’s wrong with you?” she wonders.

“You twisted, crazy bitch. You. You’re what’s wrong with me.”

“You’re sweating more than it’s hot.”

“Makes me sweat bullets, telling me I’ll be left to burn.”

“You’re doing something there.” Having backed away, she approaches again. “What’re you doing?”

He chokes on another rush of acid, and it foams from his nose, and his breath stinks as if it is the exhalation of a corpse.


35


SITTING BEHIND THE STEERING WHEEL, Ivan Petro reminded Jane of a realistically detailed special-effects mannequin like those that had sometimes been used in old horror movies made before computer animation became ever better and cheaper, when the script called for the head to explode. The cords of muscle in his neck were as taut as winch cables. His skull almost seemed to inflate: flushed face swollen and streaming sweat, nostrils flared, eyes protuberant, the arterioles in his temples prominent and throbbing. Yellowish foam suddenly gushed from his nostrils, and he let out a cry that seemed to be an expression equally of rage and despair, and following that cry came a stream of vicious obscenities in a spray of foul spittle, as if he meant to kill her with the intensity of his hatred.

When she stepped close to the broken-out window in the driver’s door, she saw his right hand against the steering wheel, like the carved-stone fist of some wrathful god who could cleave the planet with a single blow; the zip-tie embedded in the flesh of his wrist, blood oozing as black as tar in the half-light, his shirt sleeve saturated to the elbow.

That band of hard, binding plastic was a quarter of an inch thick, and the angled teeth of the one-way ratcheted clasp was a marvel of design. The zip-tie had proved far more reliable than handcuffs. She had never known anyone to be able to free himself after being properly manacled. It simply wasn’t possible.

Ivan Petro surely realized the futility of this struggle. Yet his fury escalated, his hatred intensified, his effort increased, as though this brief imprisonment had driven him into raving madness, so that he’d strive to break free until a cerebral artery ruptured and death flooded through his brain.

The zip-tie snapped.

His sledgehammer fist flew from the steering wheel, braceleted in bloody plastic, a volley of blood drops spattering the dashboard, the windshield, even as the damaged hand dropped toward the pistol on the passenger seat. Cut muscle, sprained tendons, injured nerves didn’t affect him, as if some mystical entity had taken possession of him, some dark spirit not constrained by the laws of nature.

Jane said, “No,” and he said, “Yes,” and she shot him twice in the neck as his hand came off the passenger seat with the pistol.

Stunned, Jane backed away a few steps, feeling as if she had crossed from the waking world into a manic dream without the need to fall asleep. If he’d snapped the zip-tie, then maybe anything could happen. Maybe the ravaged flesh of his bullet-torn throat could mend before her eyes and the bullets whistle backward through the smoky air and into the barrel of her Heckler and return to the magazine, as if they had never been fired.

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