They were also recording the voice unless he had somehow managed to disable the microphones.
Suzanne stopped at the edge of the pool, broadside to the intruder.
“Out now,” the man barked.
Suzanne didn’t move.
“Ten seconds and you’re a dead goddess. I suggest you move.”
Suzanne looked at Sam. He nodded. He needed time. Where was Bud?
“Take off the suit,” the man said. No doubt he was clicking pictures as he spoke. Suzanne didn’t move. “I said take it off.”
She looked at Sam. He nodded again, his eyes trying to pick out Bud. Suzanne’s shaking hands reached behind her to untie her top. As she moved her hands and turned to the side, Bud came flying over the peak of the poolhouse roof and sent his body like a missile at the back of the intruder. The man’s neck snapped with such a pop that Sam heard it from several yards away. The man rolled down the roof, hit the concrete, and moved in ugly spasms. Suzanne screamed and ran, trying for the short way around the pool to the house, thereby actually moving toward the poolhouse and the quivering body.
Sam drew his. 357 magnum and walked forward, his eyes never leaving the man on the ground. Suzanne began yelling crazy, hysterical screams all over again; a second man stood in the poolhouse door, just ten feet from her, with a pistol leveled at her chest.
“Nobody move,” the man said, “except you.” He spoke to Suzanne. “Come over here to Papa.” like the first man, he had a dark plastic mask hiding his face.
Suzanne just shook.
Grabbing her around the neck, the man dragged Suzanne back toward the poolhouse where Bud still stood on the roof, at least twenty feet away.
“Put down your guns and come down here or I blow her brains out.”
Sam’s mind was whirling. What stalker would risk this? And how could there be two men? Something was dead wrong. Whatever the case, if the guy was a sexual psychopath, Suzanne was likely dead if he got her alone- anywhere. If he was only pretending to be a sex nut, anything was possible.
Sam started walking, trying to will Bud to ignore the gunman and retreat over the roof to strike again.
Instead, Bud dropped from the poolhouse roof to the patio.
That was wrong, son.
“Stop there,” the stalker said to Bud.
Thirty feet from Sam the intruder had a chokehold on Suzanne and his gun to her head. He began walking Suzanne the last few feet to the poolhouse. Sam couldn’t let that happen. Bud was closer but could do nothing. For a second the intruder released Suzanne to open the poolhouse door. Suzanne started to bolt, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. Bud vaulted a patio table toward the pair, and the gunman fired, hitting Bud square in the chest. A second shot fired from the hip caught Bud in the head.
Before Sam’s eyes his son thrashed and shook. Somehow the gunman’s first shot at Sam missed.
Sam leaped to the side behind a garden boulder. Bullets spat against the stone.
The sounds of Bud’s shaky breath all but paralyzed him. A sorrow so deep that it took power from his legs displaced his rage; he couldn’t turn the emotional corner. Sam stared at the ground, knowing that the maniac was dragging Suzanne to some insane torture. He forced himself to move, to peek around the boulder at his convulsing son.
The door to the poolhouse was now closed. Sam sprinted recklessly to his boy. There was a thumb-sized bloody hole above his right eye. He propped Bud’s head in his hand and devoured the bloody face with his eyes. For Sam there was no face like this in all the world and never would be again. For the briefest moment there was a flicker of recognition in Bud’s eyes; then he was gone.
With nothing more than grief and duty in his heart, Sam marched to the poolhouse door. The large workout area was empty and undisturbed. Out the back door Sam saw nothing. All he could think was that his initial suspicion had been correct: These guys knew something he didn’t. They must have had a way into the compound. If they didn’t glide on a parasail, maybe there was an underground passage. Suzanne had not mentioned tunnels when asked directly about them, but this property had been in use for years. Just yesterday he had learned that somewhere in the immediate area of the estate, there had been a silver mine.
The poolhouse had a large mechanical room. Once it had stored coal for a 1930s-style furnace. He would start there.
Sam ran down the hall past the showers and into the large game room. To the right he remembered one door. He found two. The first opened into a large storage closet. Nothing inside. The second led to the mechanical room, whose ancient concrete floor, uneven and tilted in some areas, held a cast-iron cover Sam didn’t recall seeing.
Careless.
He pointed the. 357 at the cover and lifted it clear. Nothing but a four-foot-deep hole. Jumping down, he looked around at a big earthen pit blackened with coal remnants.
The chamber was bounded on four corners with old concrete stub walls. Disgusted, he climbed out, thinking he’d better search the whole building fast. As he made for the door a swatch of black fiber caught his eye. Clothing. It had been trapped under a concrete chunk that was part of the fractured floor. The cement block wouldn’t budge when he used his fingers. He went to the room’s workbench, pulled down a pry bar, and tried again.
It came up. Beneath the wooden frame on which the jagged piece of concrete had rested was a black hole, a tunnel. Returning to the workbench, Sam found a light, shined it down inside.
Jesus.
He estimated a ten-foot drop; a ladder hung in place. These guys had done a lot of work.
First Sam hung into the shaft upside down with light and pistol. It had the smell of dead air, fetid with the cycle of living and dying. On the floor of the shaft lay fresh loose earth from their recent excavation under the poolhouse. Although the shaft went in two directions, all the footprints came and went away from the direction of the swimming pool and toward the nearest property boundary. His eye followed the footprints to a bend in the shaft some forty feet from the hole.
He turned and climbed down the ladder in the conventional manner. Obviously he was descending into one of the old silver mine tunnels. There wasn’t time to be cautious. Once on the floor of the tunnel, he ran with the tracks.
Sam had almost reached the bend when he heard the sounds of a struggle. He turned off his light and slowed.
“Don’t make me ruin your face.”
Suzanne’s assailant was standing at the base of another ladder. She was on her knees naked in front of him.
“Go to hell.”
Sam rounded the corner and walked silently toward the gunman.
“I’m not going to kill the best piece of ass in North America. Not yet.”
Sam aimed at the gunman’s head, but it was indistinct and would be hard to hit in the semidarkness. He dropped his aim to the center of the man’s shoulder.
He whistled loudly.
Startled, the man whirled reflexively. It was the only excuse Sam needed. Lead poured out of Sam’s pistol, hitting the man’s torso as if little patches of the gunmen’s hide were exploding. Sam felt only a sting in his arm before the return fire caught him square in the chest and sent him flying. Tough son of a bitch, Sam recalled thinking before he passed out…
Twenty-eight
“When I woke up in the hospital the world was a different place,” Sam told Anna. “Losing my son was everything, and it felt as though nothing of me remained. I just wasn’t there anymore without him. I gave my staff a large severance except the people feeding and maintaining Big Brain. Suzanne insisted that I go with her to France
