Page 34 of Rooke
“You were meant to tell me the truth,” he says. “You were meant to do everything I told you to, and you were meant to tell the truth. That way, I could get what I came here for and you could go on your merry way. But now?”
That sounds ominous. I don’t like the way that sounds at all. The guy in the ski mask tuts disapprovingly. “I’m supposed to kill you now,” he informs me. “I can’t really see any other way out of it.”
“You don’t have to. You don’t have to kill me. Not if you don’t want to.”
The guy in the ski mask sighs. “Of course Iwantto. Wanting isn’t relevant. I have to follow the rules, even if you don’t. How much money do you have at your house?”
“I don’t know. Three…three hundred dollars?”
“Three hundred? That’s it?” The guy gets to his feet, hissing like a snake. “You think I can save your life for a mere three hundred dollars? You’re fucked, lady. Well and truly fucked.” He starts toward me, and the scuffed toes of his worn leather boots fill my vision. Panic surges inside me.
“Wait! Wait! I have…I have my mother’s engagement ring at home. It’s two carats. It…it must be worth at least fifteen thousand. And I have forty-seven thousand dollars in my bank account. I can get it for you. I can give you that.”
“You think that’s what your life’s worth? Forty-seven thousand and a piece of metal and rock?”
“It’s all I have.” My voice is small, so quiet, but it echoes in the yawning corridor of the museum.
The man in the ski mask doesn’t say anything. He stands over me, looking down at me, those cold, stark, lifeless blue eyes of his assessing me, and I know it deep down inside. This is a pivotal moment. This is where he decides if he’s going to kill me or allow me to live. If I say the wrong thing, if I even look at him the wrong way, he’s going to take that knife of his and he’s going to drive it into my chest. There will be nothing I can do about it.
A thought occurs to me in the moments that pass. Once more I’m faced with my own death. The first time was in my car five years ago, sitting in the driver’s seat, waiting for the nose of my car to hit the cold, unfriendly waters of the East River. And now, laying on my back, on the floor of the museum, staring up into the eyes of a stranger. This time, though, I’m suddenly not afraid. I survived near drowning only to die on a daily basis, every time I remembered that my son was no longer with me. If I die today, I won’t have to suffer through the pain of that truth every time I wake up in the morning. I won’t have to stand in the doorway of his bedroom anymore, my arms wrapped around my own body as I try to hold myself up, looking at all of his things, his Matchbox cars and his electric train sets, his neatly folded clothes piled up on the end of his bed, or his threadbare teddy bear, Javier, laying face down on the dusty floorboards in front of his window. I will just be gone, and there will be nothing left. No shame. No guilt. No loneliness. No more pain. Just the welcoming arms of oblivion.
I close my eyes.
My death doesn’t arrive, though.
“I suppose that’s what you’re worth, then,” my attacker whispers. “Forty-seven thousand dollars isn’t enough for some people. But I like you, Doc. It’s enough for you today.”
******
I can’t walk properly. I can’t put any weight onto my left leg; every time I try, a searing, sharp pain stabs through my nerve endings. Not just the nerve endings in my leg, but all over my body, quick and wicked as lightning. It’s breathtaking in its severity—so much so that I almost lose consciousness as the guy in the ski mask drags me by the arm down the corridor.
“You’re going to take me out of the secret door,” he says, ignoring my labored breathing. I’m hopping and skipping, trying to keep up with him, but he seems oblivious. “Once we’re out of the secret door, you’re going to wait out of sight while I hail a taxi. We’ll both sit in the back. You’re going to pretend like I’m your friend. You’re not going to try and raise the alarm. If you do, it’ll all be out of my control.I won’t be able to help you anymore. Do you understand?”
“There isn’t a secret door. There’s only the loading dock entrance, and—”
“The loading dock entrance, then. The loading dock. The loading dock. Yes.” He says the words, and it’s final. I can’t argue with him. I can’t suggest another option. Something’s not right with this guy, I can tell. Aside from being a violent criminal, I suspect he is also suffering from some sort of mental disorder that causes him to fixate on things. When he wanted me to apologize in my office, it was almost as if he was anxious. His volatile actions were driven by some desperate need for me to do as he bid me. He won’t stop talking about rules—rules that I must follow, and a completely different set of rules that he needs to follow. And now, yanking me by the arm, it seems imperative that we reach the loading dock as quickly as humanly possible.
He obviously doesn’t know the way, so he continually shoves me out in front of him, forcing me to stand on my injured leg, and every time I transfer weight onto it my stomach turns. I’m going to throw up soon, and I won’t be able to hold back. I already know he won’t like that.
He keeps me away from the windows. He stands on my right as we make painfully slow progress down the stairs, blocking the view outside so I can’t see what’s going on. I think that maybe there are people out there, gathered on the steps of the museum. I don’t have a watch on, and I’m too scared to pull my cell phone from the waist band of my skirt to check the time on there, so I have no idea what the hour is, but it feels late. Late enough that the museum should be open now. The fact that it’s not tells me he’s barred the entranceway somehow, and that other staff members have been alerted to the fact that something untoward is happening inside the building. Do the police know? Dear god, I hope so.
It takes forever to reach the ground floor. My hip hurts, and so does my back. The side of my head hurts, too. My skin feels strange; I think maybe there’s dried blood on my temple and further down, over my cheek.
Where is Rooke right now? My heart turns over in my chest when I think about him. If he were here… God, I can’t even think about that. I’ll burst into tears, and I need to stay as calm as possible. I know it, though. If Rooke were here, I already know he would have put this psycho down.
It feels like a million years ago that I arrived at the museum and saw that the Christmas tree had been erected. When I see it in the foyer now, my heart trips over itself. There, at the base of the tree, Amanda, the security guard that checked my bag earlier, is laying on the floor in a crimson pool of blood. She’s face down, her head twisted to one side at an odd angle, her eyes open and unseeing. I can’t see her neck, but I can imagine what it must look like. It hits me that I didn’t believe the guy had killed anyone until now. I thought that he was just trying to scare me, but seeing Amanda laid out like this, clearly dead, blows that theory out of the water. Cold fear coils itself into knots in the pit of my stomach.
I am never getting out of this museum. I am never getting out of here alive.
“Hurry. Move.” The guy prods me in the back, and a flash of pain lights up the inside of my head. “I don’t like the way she’s looking at me,” he whispers.
I look around, hoping to see someone else down here on the ground floor with us, but there’s no one. A second later it dawns on me: he means Amanda. He doesn’t like the wayAmandais looking at him. Except she’s not looking at him, of course, she’s not looking at anyone, because she’s dead. He shivers, and it’s like he’s seeing her body for the very first time, like he had nothing to do with her current state of being. He blocks the view through the entranceway as he leads me in the direction of the gift shop. “Where is it?” Where’s the loading dock?”
Behind me, the slap of hands on the door echoes out loudly, nearly startling me out of my skin. “Hey! Hey, come out here!” Someone screams. A wall of sound erupts outside, and the guy in the ski mask curses loudly.
“They’ve seen us. They know where we are. It’s too late.”
I shake my head, knowing what too late means for me. “It’s not. It’s dark in here. They can only see shadows moving. They won’t have any idea what’s going on. Come on. Let’s go before she wakes up.”
