Locke 2 (Blackwater Boys #4)

Forty-Four

Kali

“A re you alright in there?” His voice was tinged with concern. “If you don’t respond, I’m going to have to call for some assistance.”

I took a moment to collect myself. Nick was at my door. He was talking to me. If I lowered the window, he was going to know it was me. I couldn’t even lie to his ex-wife, how was I going to lie about why I was here, in the middle of nowhere, a street away from his cabin?

I looked down at the keys in my hand. For a split second, I thought of driving out of here, but then I’d be leaving Jem behind.

I couldn’t do that.

He did have my phone though. Except the reception was rubbish and this whole thing was a stupid mistake. We were both so obsessed with finding Lenny, with doing something right in light of our traumas, that we didn’t consider how bad it could get.

Calm down , I reasoned. It’s just Nick at the door. He said he’d call for assistance. That doesn’t sound like someone who is going to march you out to your death.

I nodded. All points had led to Arthur Ambrose. For all I knew, Locke might have gotten the answers we needed to find Lenny.

“I’m waiting for my friend,” I said through the door.

“What’s that?” he asked, leaning closer to the window.

I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. Immediately, I turned completely in Nick’s direction and wiped the fog from the window, allowing his light to shine on me. His eyes found mine, and instantly they brightened with recognition.

“Kari?” he said, shocked.

“Nick?” I returned, feigning surprise.

“What are you doing here?” His flashlight swung around, pointing at the cabin in front of him.

“We got lost.” The less I said, the better. I needed to appear in distress. I made my eyes water. “I’m really scared. My friend…he hasn’t come back to the car, and I can’t just leave—”

“Slow down,” he cut in. “Take a deep breath, alright? Are you okay?”

Tears ran down my face. I tried to nod, but I made my shoulders shake.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “Kari, can you open the door for me, so I know you’re okay?”

I continued to “sob.” I had no intention of unlocking the door.

“Kari, please open up. You’re frightening me.”

I ignored his request the second time. I really needed Jem to show up right now.

“I have to wait for him,” I tried to say through overexaggerated breaths. “I can’t leave him.”

“Kari, I have to call for assistance if you don’t open the door. You don’t look well.”

How could he call for assistance if there was no reception? Or did he have a satellite phone that he stored at his cabin for emergencies? He was a skilled mountain man. Of course he would be prepared in all things, and yet I still didn’t want to open the door.

After a few moments waiting for my response, he walked around the car, the light leaving me. I sat up straight and peered around, searching for him. He’d turned the flashlight off, but I heard the crunch of his footsteps rounding the car. My face burned, my whole body tensed tightly, as I listened to his every move. Sounds came at the backdoor and my heart lurched. Was he trying to see if they were open? I grabbed for the knife Jem left me. Unsheathed, it was on the seat next to me. I gripped the handle tight and hid the blade under my purse as I continued to watch him.

He was doing something.

I didn’t know what.

The not knowing petrified me.

“Please, Jem…Please…”

But Jem was nowhere to be seen, and the minutes continued to tick by. I was either in the midst of the friendliest doctor who genuinely wanted to help me, or I was caught in the clutches of a monster, trying to lure me into his den.

I stopped hearing footsteps.

There was no longer any sound at all but that of my breaths leaving my body in quick intervals.

Then I sensed it again. That presence. I turned my head, and my entire body went numb as I looked at the figure at my window. Only this time he didn’t use the light. He just stood there. Watching me. His face was blank and unrecognisable. This was not the handsome doctor that charmed me and made me feel crazy for not wanting him.

I knew in that very instant that I had found him.

He was the man on Lenny’s wall.

He was the man that looked into his window.

His voice sounded out, and it sounded dead. “I found your friend.”

I didn’t speak, didn’t blink. I just stared at him, feeling more and more helpless.

“It didn’t end well for him.”

I thought of the gunshot, and now my stomach began to churn.

He continued, unperturbed. “It won’t end well for you, either, but I can give you a head start—”

Before he even finished, I stuck the key into the ignition and turned it. My heart fell when nothing happened. What the fuck had he done to the truck? I tried again and again, but the car was dead.

“I can turn around, close my eyes, and you can run,” he continued, like I didn’t just try and bolt. “I carry a stopwatch. You might smash the old record. That would be fun.”

I grabbed the phone and turned it on. I tried to call 911, but nothing happened. My fingers shook as I repeatedly called to no avail.

“If you don’t want to play, that’s fine,” he continued. “It just means I’ll be pulling you out of that car and we’ll be playing a different sort of game.”

I felt dizzy and faint. I knew these feelings well. But you never got used to it. You never made friends with fear.

“Are you going to run?” he asked. “Or are you going to continue to hide in that car, waiting for someone to save you?”

It was cliche, but I couldn’t help but ask, “Why are you doing this, Nick?”

“Why does anyone do anything?” he returned, coldly. “We are who we are, Kari.”

“Were you born a monster?” I genuinely wondered as I looked at him. My hand gripped the handle of the knife so tightly, my muscles ached. “Or did someone make you that way? Was it your father?”

He smiled, but like his voice, it just looked wrong. “My father taught me how to build shelters and catch fish. More than that, he taught me how to hunt. But he didn’t hunt for sport. He hunted to eat. You’d be surprised how challenging a difference like that can be between a father and son.”

I thought of the photos on the wall of his clinic. Happy photos when he was a child, his father grinning ear to ear in front of fires and rivers.

Then I thought of the photo of Nick’s graduation, and the empty look on his father’s face. I misread it as cold. Perhaps he was terrified of his son, or aware of what he was.

“Where is Lenny?” I asked. I wanted to sound furious and demanding. To let him know I was aware of what he had done. But I couldn’t help the fear that clogged my throat. The sadness that enveloped my being at the idea of that little boy being hunted down for sport.

Nick’s face filled with sick curiosity. “Is that what you’d rather play?”

“I don’t want to play anything.”

“You have to play,” he said, determinedly. “One option leaves you running in the forest, the other hiding in this truck, and the third…the third is a one-way ticket to your creator, but the payoff is knowing where he is.” He took a step closer, his face nearly pressing against the glass as he peered at me ominously. “How bad do you want to know, Kari?”

All his options led to my death. I kept looking around, but no one was there. He just said he’d gotten to Jem, and that was my fucking fault. I did this, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was going to get into this truck if I didn’t move. If I ran, he was going to find me. If he took me to Lenny, though…would it offer me comfort knowing what happened to him?

How did I want to go?

Running, hiding, or knowing where Lenny was?

This man was sick. He stared at me with such excitement in his eyes, I wanted to use the knife on him just to know he could bleed.

“You would take me to him?” I asked.

“Of course.”

The next words burned my throat. “Is he alive?”

“You’ll know if you play.”

“Where would you take me?”

“To him.”

He wasn’t telling me where he was, and that made me crack.

“Where the fuck is he?!” I screamed, shaken by the vehemence exploding out of me now as I glared at this sick fucker who smiled cruelly at me.

He pressed his face against the window, peering at me intently. Feasting on my torment. Enjoying every bit of it. “He’s somewhere very dark.”

The hole.

“He was so easy to lure,” he continued, thoughtfully. “Give the kid no one cares about some attention. A sucker when he’s sick and afraid of the doctor. Dangle some crayons. Show up at his window when he’s locked in there at night. Yeah, a boy like that will think you’re their hero.”

I’d never felt so much intense hatred for another human being until that very moment.

My nostrils flared as I stared back at him, refusing to look away, even when every inch of me was screaming to run.

But running never got me closer to home.

And home was a place inside my soul that I let get rundown and dilapidated.

The more I ran, the further away I got from that hopeful girl I used to be.

“Come home,” chirped Aurora. “We have a party to go to!”

If I was going to die, I was going to die going home.