Silence descended over the room like a smothering hand.
Frank tensed, listening, afraid the fracas had affected his hearing. From above came the incessant pounding and muffled shouts of the officers on the first floor as they fought to break down the door. Beyond that, he picked out the haggard gasping of the wounded men in the adjacent room, followed by the louder sound of the empty MP-5 clattering to the floor.
Frank brought up one hand, signaling for the officers on the staircase to hold their position. Given the number of men Kane had dropped in the other room, a veritable arsenal of loaded weapons awaited the killer’s hands.
He looked to his own weapon. Smoke rose from a bullet hole that had peeled open the breach, exposing the copper shell of a cartridge.
He knelt down and set the weapon on the floor. His helmet slipped forward on his sweat-slicked forehead when he did, and he quickly pushed it back, eyeing the doorway.
He upholstered his sidearm, a 9mm Sig, and readied to move.
Staying low on the narrow cellar steps, he tipped his head around the corner of the bullet-shattered doorframe and got a quick glimpse of the other room.
Kane stood amongst the crumpled bodies of the fallen officers like the sole survivor of a war, splattered with blood, surrounded by smoke. The final moans of the dying faded to silence.
Frank concentrated on the fact Kane hadn’t replaced the MP-5 with one of the other firearms scattered about the floor. Instead, the killer stood amidst the wreckage of bodies, arms in front of him, palms up, studying his own injuries in soundless contemplation.
Frank’s grip on the handgun tightened. He flicked off the safeties and put two pounds of pull on the trigger.
Across the room, Kane pulled apart the two halves of his shirt and Frank tensed. The cloth had once been faded brown with a lighter tan check pattern, but now glistened almost solid crimson.
Multitudes of dark gunshot wounds peppered Kane’s torso, each a fatal ticket that should’ve secured his passage to Hell. Stranger still, among the scattering of bullet holes lay a series of deep lacerations that could’ve only come from a knife. Not random cuts, either. They looked like designs carved into his flesh, symbols similar those written across the stone pillar sitting in the pool of blood.
Frank quivered with disgust.
Without warning, Kane’s expression changed from triumph to
Frank watched the man curl his bloody hands into claws, staring at them in shock.
Kane shrieked at the sight.
Frank recoiled from the sound and almost lost his footing on the steps. Steadying himself, he readied his weapon, watching Kane slap at his bare chest and stomach, flailing himself, almost like he was trying to brush away the bullet holes. He cried louder with each breath, stomping his feet, ranting like a child in the thrall of a tantrum.
Frank motioned for the two officers on the stairs to get ready to move, certain they could take the man unaware while he wallowed in his deranged self-assault. He edged back out of Kane’s sight, stood up, and—
The orange light bulb over the landing suddenly popped and went out.
Frank’s half-drawn breath snared in his throat as darkness leapt in to take the light’s place, stopped at the cellar doorway by the glow of the few candles in Kane’s earth-walled lair.
He hesitated, poised on the verge of a tension-induced heart attack. Kane had fallen silent just a second before the light flashed out, and the thought of confronting him while nearly blind, armed or not, no longer seemed wise.
There came a noise: the subtle rattling of a chain.
It sounded at Frank’s back, from somewhere in the cellar of patchwork cadavers: an inconspicuous jingle under the clamor of men still trying to force their way through Hell’s gate at the top of the stairs.
“Fraaaaank,” a voice growled in his ear.
He swung around and fired three rounds into the wrinkled, slack-eyed face of a dead man chained at the far side of the room, at least twenty feet away. No one loomed behind him in the cellar. Everyone was dead. Dead and unmoving.
He twisted back to confront the doorway and met Kane’s grinning face. It flashed into the candlelight, his black eyes once again gleaming with a red reflection. Frank tried to aim his weapon, but Kane caught his hand, locking it in an unbreakable grip. He smashed it into the doorjamb, holding it there, with the handgun’s muzzle pointed uselessly away.
Then the knife flashed into view, clutched in the killer’s fist. It arced toward him with merciless speed, too fast to dodge, but skipped off the brim of his helmet when he tried to maneuver out of its way. The blade grazed his eyeball, splitting its surface, then stabbed into his face. It streaked down his cheekbone, cutting a hot trail from his ruptured eyeball to his jaw.
Frank shrieked.
Kane released him, letting him fall backward into the cellar. The killer smiled at him, his teeth gleaming in the murk.
Then Kane jolted and convulsed when gunfire exploded through him from behind, opening more holes in his chest.
He hit the floor, teetering on the dark edge of unconsciousness.
And blacked out when Kane collapsed beside him.
CHAPTER 22
Frank saw that his account of the raid on Kane’s farm had brought the young detective to the edge of her seat.
“The guys upstairs needed to use an explosive charge to get through the basement door,” he said. “The damned thing looked normal enough, but it had a solid steel core, with magnetic locking plates on the top and bottom.”
“What made it shut?” Melissa asked.
“Too many people trying to get around it at the same time,” he said, grimacing at the memory. “Once it closed, it locked. By the time the medics got to us again, Kane had slaughtered fifteen good men. It was a madhouse.”
Detective Humble shook her head in amazement. “And even after they shot him
Frank nodded. “The headshot required the partial removal of his frontal lobe and reconstructive skull plates, but somehow he managed to survive in a coma. When I got word that he’d finally died last week… Well, I think you can imagine why I made those inquires to be sure he was dead.”
Melissa readjusted herself on the couch. “I never knew how intense the arrest had been for everyone involved. For you.”
Frank heard pity in her voice, and for a moment, he couldn’t respond. Recalling those details of the past had made him shaky, replete with emotions he couldn’t suppress. He looked at his clasped hands and said, “I put the whole story into my book, hoping I could rid myself of it for good—the arrest, the partner theory, everything. A lot of people said I was capitalizing on the misery of others, but I never did it for the money. I want you to understand that. I wrote the book because I was looking for closure. I suppose I was foolish to believe it would help.”
“What you did was a perfectly healthy way of dealing with it,” she told him.
He gave her an appreciative smile for her empathy, which she returned with a smile of her own. For an instant, he imagined himself leaning forward and kissing her. The thought blindsided him like an unseen assailant, hitting him hard, leaving him dazed.
