He crossed the empty stretch of land between the fence and the building, shaking out his limbs in an attempt to bring as much warmth into them as he could, and then he put his hands on the cold metal and began to climb.
Twenty-Four
Fletcher opened the door on the left because we had no idea of where to start looking for Finn, and she figured we had to start somewhere. She found a closet full of cleaning supplies and not much else. I opened the door across from it as something slammed into the back door, the sentries still trying to bust their way past the heavy barricade. I looked down at a set of narrow, carpet-covered stairs.
“MacGowan said the room he saw in the video had cement block walls. Maybe it was an unfinished basement?” I said as I reached up to pull the string dangling from the bare bulb. The light was wan and flickering, in need of changing.
“Better than standing around here,” Fletcher said, eyeing the trembling door.
I drew my gun and held it at the ready as we descended the stairs. There were dirty boot prints on the carpet, leading both up and down the steps, but the staircase hit a dead end at the bottom and turned sharply to the right, so it was impossible to tell if anyone was down there. It seemed every other stair creaked and groaned no matter how I put my weight on it, announcing my approach to anyone who might care to listen.
I hit the landing and spun, putting my gun between me and anything that might be in the room. But there was only dust, two empty chairs, and a discarded magazine.
“Well, shit,” I said, holstering my weapon as I moved further into the room. The basement wasn’t large enough to run under the entire estate, but maybe it had once been a wine cellar or other such storage.
“Do you think he was here?” Fletcher asked as she began to nose around the edges of the room.
“At least for that video.” I ran my hand down the rough cement stone of the wall. “I hope they at least had the decency not to keep him down here the entire week.”
You might keep a man you’d abducted in a dingy, depressing room like this, but I thought you had to be a special kind of monster to stash a kid somewhere so uncomfortable and frightening.
“Do you think he’s in a bedroom or something upstairs?”
“They’d probably move him as soon as they realized they were under attack,” I mused, rubbing at my eyes as I tried to think. At least it was warmer inside, out of the wind and rain. I took off my wet hat and gloves, tucking them away in my duster pocket, and tried to squeeze some of the water from my hair. “He could be anywhere.”
Fletcher followed my lead and shed some of her sodden outerwear. “Would they try to smuggle him out?”
I hadn’t thought of that, I realized with a jolt of fear. Otherwise, I would have put a watcher on the dock. “They’d be crazy to risk it, right?” I said. “It would be too easy for one of us to spot them, and they wouldn’t know how well we have the island surrounded.”
The answer to that was not terribly well. There was a decent amount of shore between each of our landing points, but if I started thinking about that too hard, my whole plan might collapse.
“Let’s assume he’s here,” Fletcher decided, because there probably wasn’t much we could do if he wasn’t. “Let’s go find someone to tell us where.”
I nodded. It was a solid plan. Surely, there would still be someone inside, guarding valuables or the bossman. They wouldn’t all rush outside and leave this place undefended.
I jogged back upstairs, following the trail of water my coat had left behind when we came down and paused to listen at the door for a second before I pushed it open. The chest was still blocking the door to the outside, but it had been shoved forward half a foot, and there was an arm clawing at the gap, trying to widen it further.
“Should we ask one of them?” Fletcher whispered.
I shook my head. Four against two odds were not really something I wanted to get into at the moment, especially not in the narrow corridor.
We tried to move quietly to the door we hadn’t opened yet, but an eye pressed up against that gap at just the wrong second and spotted us.
“Hey!” someone shouted, and the hand withdrew to draw a gun and fire wildly at us.
Fletcher and I threw ourselves into the next room and slammed the door shut. A single bullet spat through the wood, inches from Fletcher’s shoulder, and she stared at the faintly smoking hole, eyes wide, as the sound of struggle intensified outside.
I grabbed her elbow and shook it, pulling her back to the present. “Worry about being dead later,” I said.
“Great advice,” she drawled but pushed away her fear, and we turned to face the room together.
Thick rugs covered the floor in between the shiny leather furniture arrayed before an unlit fire. Bookshelves that looked like they were only there for shore took up two of the walls, the other two hung with large paintings of faraway places. There was an old-fashioned gun on the mantle above the fireplace, gleaming in the light of the faux-lamp that I turned on. The whole place screamed ‘pretentious’ to me.
I picked the far door to go through as something splintered in the hallway behind us, and we wound up in a corridor with far too
