Castle of Sorrows Read online

  “You bet he is,” Rubio said in his raspy voice. “Bastard’s toying with us.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant he’s playing a game on that—” Griffin started to say, but Rubio was already opening the door and shouldering past him. Griffin followed, scared to death of what was about to happen, but on some level grateful to be out of the house. Nicky and his unpredictability…Griffin remembered the smacking and thumping sounds from earlier, Nicky likely beating on the stringy-haired girl. The guy was an animal. Marvin, he was scary too, but at least most of the time you could guess what he was going to do, or at least afterward work through his logic. With Nicky there was no logic, only a brooding silence sometimes broken by eruptions of savage violence.

  Then there was Rubio…

  Actually, as Griffin followed Rubio up the walk, through the driveway and toward the street, he realized no one in the outfit scared him more than Ray Rubio. Bullington was huge and remorseless, but Griffin had never observed him inflicting pain just for the sake of doing it.

  Rubio was batshit crazy.

  Rubio stalked across the road, no center line but plenty wide, the houses close enough to call it a neighborhood but spaced far enough to provide the illusion of isolation. On the far side of the road Griffin saw the fed leaning against his car, the silver paint in stark contrast to the wooded rise that began just beyond the dusty shoulder of the road. There was exposed dirt from rain and erosion at the base of the hill, but down the road a ways, where the road serpentined gradually lower, the forest sloped even more dramatically so the road and the trees were on an even plane. Griffin saw a trail there, maybe forty feet away, and wondered where the other agent had gone. Up that trail, down the curving road for an afternoon walk, or maybe somewhere on Marvin’s property where he could peer in the side and back windows? The thought filled Griffin’s belly with cold lead. He was the assigned lookout, him and Bullington both. If that other fed, the short one with the dark complexion, made his way around the house, he might get bold enough to spy at Nicky through the window, and once he beheld that scene they were all screwed, The Doors piping through the expensive sound system. The flat-chested girl with the pale, crinkly hair and the bloody ear. The water bong positioned right beside the couch where anybody could see it. The hypodermic needles. The baggie of white powder.

  Shit. Griffin had to get back inside.

  But before he could, Rubio said, “You lookin’ for somebody?”

  The stocky agent frowned in concentration, but did not look up from his mobile device. In the silence Griffin found himself contemplating the numbers of the situation. There were two feds, and there were four of Marvin’s men. He supposed it was good to be in the majority, but neither two nor four were numbers he cared for much.

  Griffin was a few feet behind Ray Rubio, technically standing in the road, but though he couldn’t see Rubio’s face, he could see well enough the way the broad back beneath the navy blue windbreaker expanded as Rubio puffed himself up. It reminded Griffin of the hood of a king cobra. A king cobra with a raspy voice and an affinity for shearing guys’ noses off with a mandolin slicer.

  “Maybe you don’t hear so good. I asked you a question.”

  “Just a second,” the agent said without taking his eyes off the game. He was shaking the iPhone, his tongue poking out of the side of his mouth in concentration. The agent had on a silly-looking white hat with blue little sailboats on it and a royal-blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt. He was a big guy, six feet tall and very broad, and though there was a softness about his sloping shoulders, Griffin also got the impression the man possessed a good deal of physical strength.

  The agent stopped shaking the phone, stared at it a moment, then tossed back his head and groaned. “Doesn’t that beat all?” he said, grinning sardonically at Rubio. “The machine won again.”

  Rubio didn’t speak, which Griffin took for a very bad sign. When Rubio was talking to you in that raspy voice, you wished he’d stop talking. But when he just stood there and looked at you with those coal-black eyes, you wished you were anywhere else in the world.

  The agent smiled at Rubio as if they were old pals. “You believe that?” the agent said. “That’s three out of the last four this damned thing has beaten me.”

  When Rubio continued to glower at the agent in ominous silence, the agent favored Griffin with a sheepish grin. “I always play Yahtzee when I’m waiting. It’s a weakness I have. My mom and dad used to make us kids play it every Saturday night, but we secretly enjoyed it. My dad usually beat us all because he had the best luck.”

  In the silence that followed, Griffin glanced from the agent to Rubio and back to the agent. To break the terrible quiet, Griffin asked, “What are you doing here?”

  The agent’s eyebrows went up and he nodded as if impressed. “Ahh, I wondered when one of you would ask me that. It turns out I’m waiting for your boss, a Mr. Marvin Irvin? I’d like to talk to him about a couple things.”

  Griffin swallowed.

  He could still smell marijuana. He wondered if the agent smelled it.

  “Marvin’s not here,” Rubio said.

  “Yeah, I know that,” the agent said. “But I figured I wait here long enough…” He smiled, showing them big white teeth.

  Rubio’s voice was gruffer than usual. “What if Marvin don’t want to see you?”

  “Oh, he will.” The agent extended his hand. “I’m Jacob Huffer,” he said. “And you guys are Griffin Toomey and Raymond Rubio.” When Rubio didn’t shake, Huffer dropped his hand, unabashed. “How you doin’, Ray?” he said in what Griffin assumed was supposed to be a parody of a New York accent.

  Rubio stared at Jacob Huffer. There was a pulsing twitch in Rubio’s left temple.

  Oh crap, Griffin thought. He had moved abreast of Rubio and could now see the soulless void in his eyes. The deadness in Rubio’s expression chilled Griffin to the marrow, but if the agent noticed it he wasn’t letting on. Or, Griffin realized with escalating terror, the agent perceived what was in Rubio’s face and was actually daring the big man to do something. Oh crap, Griffin thought. Please don’t push him. You don’t know what he can do.

  But Huffer said, “That bother you, Raymond? My talking like that? It was actually an homage to my favorite television show. You ever watch Friends, Raymond? Or does your sense of humor not turn that way? Maybe you prefer that sicko shit. Stuff about serial killers. Dexter. Cold Case Files. The Walking Dead maybe. I’d say The Twilight Zone, but that’d take too much imagination.”

  Rubio’s hand moved to his hip.

  Jacob Huffer swept back his shirt and brought his fingers to rest on the holster of what to Griffin looked like one hell of a huge gun. That had been the reason, he realized now, for the ridiculous Hawaiian shirt.

  “I’d drop that hand if I were you, Raymond. This is a .38, and I suspect you know what kind of a hole it would put in that polyester windbreaker of yours.”

  Rubio’s hand didn’t drop. Neither man moved.

  “You wanna see if I’ll do it?” Huffer asked, looking delighted. “I’m happy to shoot you, Raymond. I know about the stuff you’ve done. Things so sick and depraved they’d make Ted Bundy cringe. And you know what, Raymond—”

  A look of flabbergasted surprise spread over Jacob Huffer’s face. He actually smacked his forehead with an open palm. “Shit, man, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier. Your favorite show is Everybody Loves Raymond, right? I mean, it’s too perfect not to be true.”

  Rubio’s left hand, hanging at his side, was bunching into a fist. His right hand, the one near his hip pocket, remained poised where it was.

  Huffer kept on. “Romano, Rubio. The names are damn near the same. I bet you make a mean pasta, don’t you, Raymond?”

  Rubio’s fingers inched toward the side of his sweatpants. Huffer’s eyes widened a fraction, his own fingers closing on the handle of hi
s gun. “You don’t want holes in your chest, I’d drop that hand right now, Raymond.”

  No one spoke for a long moment. No one moved. Griffin didn’t breathe.

  Then two things happened simultaneously. Down the road a ways, the other agent, the one Griffin had totally forgotten about, appeared at the mouth of the trail. What he’d been doing, Griffin had no idea, but in a matter of milliseconds his expression changed from surprise to steely awareness. He was already coming toward them, a hand closing on what Griffin was sure was the butt of a handgun, the other hand held up in warning.

  The other thing that happened at the same moment was the appearance of a female jogger a good way down the road. The agent approaching them was now forty feet away and closing. The lady jogger—she was probably in her late forties but looked like she was in great shape—was twice that distance away, but she had her head down, fiddling with something attached to her headphones. She had on a bright orange sports bra and black spandex shorts, and though she was chugging uphill, she was making great time.

  Huffer still sounded like he was entertaining a group of partygoers with a great story. “Hey, McWilliams! Come on over and meet my buddies. Griffin here’s scared shitless, but Ray Romano wants to rumble.”

  Rubio’s hand closed on whatever was in his hip pocket; Griffin was shielded from it, but he assumed it was the same hand cannon he always carried, the Dirty Harry Callahan special, the Magnum something or other.

  “Hands in the air,” McWilliams shouted. In slow motion Griffin glanced at the woman jogger, sixty feet away now. McWilliams was closer. McWilliams’s gun was out and pointing at Rubio, who still hadn’t moved. When McWilliams saw Griffin glance at the lady jogger, McWilliams hunched his shoulders as if expecting to be attacked and cast a look behind him. McWilliams halted, threw a hand up at the woman to grab her attention, and shouted, “Get on the ground!” but the lady was still screwing with the iPod or whatever the hell she was listening to.

  Then a shot so loud it made Griffin’s bladder let go erupted nearby. The one named McWilliams pinwheeled his arms and jerked sideways, and before he went down Griffin caught a glimpse of a huge black hole just beneath his right armpit. He struck the dusty shoulder and arched his back in an ecstasy of pain.

  The gunshot had finally gotten the attention of the female jogger, who was standing only ten or so feet away from the writhing federal agent, whose wound was now gushing blood the color of cranberries into the dust. Her palms were to her cheeks in a gesture straight out of some comic book, her mouth a trembling oval. She had dark reddish hair and a lot of makeup—maybe some actress trying to keep in shape between gigs. The jogger gaped at McWilliams a moment; then, when the grisly sight of the dying agent apparently became too much for her, she switched her gaze to the three men standing by the silver car. Huffer finally had his gun out, but he was pointing it at something caddycorner from the lady.

  Griffin and the lady watched in horrified silence as Rubio finally produced the object from his hip pocket, which was a nasty looking knife, the kind Griffin imagined you’d use to dress a deer. Rubio took a step forward, raised the enormous knife across his body, and then tore loose with a backhanded slash that unzipped Jacob Huffer’s throat. The blade sliced the agent so deep and wide that Huffer’s neck looked like a hinged box, only the contents of the box were spraying out in all directions, the hot blood showering Rubio’s maniacally grinning face. Huffer pirouetted toward the sedan, going with the momentum of Rubio’s ferocious stroke, and after painting the side of the car with gore, Huffer completed his spin and leaned backward against the trunk.

  With grim deliberateness, Rubio moved over so he was face to face with Huffer again. “You wanna make jokes about my name some more, you grinning pussy? You stupid…” He pumped the knife into Huffer’s gut. “…fucking…” He yanked the blade upward, ripping through Huffer’s flesh and entrails. “…pig!” The blade had reached Huffer’s sternum and lodged there, but Rubio wasn’t content. The agent’s unseeing eyes gaped at Rubio as Rubio placed his free hand on Huffer’s forehead, bent him backward across the trunk until the base of his skull made contact with the once-silver paint.

  The lady jogger moaned, uttered garbled oaths.

  Bent backward that way, the throat wound Rubio had inflicted was now splitting open to reveal the agent’s severed windpipe, the meaty cartilage of his ruptured throat. Blood spurted over Rubio, but the big man scarcely seemed to notice. He was sawing through Huffer’s sternum, finally dislodging his buck knife so he could continue his vertical incision through the man’s torso. Rubio was a scarlet hulk now, his wide moonface painted red, his navy blue suit sodden and black.

  Rubio might have gone on sawing and hacking all day had Jim Bullington not emerged from the bushes at the southern end of Marvin’s property. Bullington had his gun out, his face as expressionless as ever.

  Griffin finally realized where the hole in McWilliams’s armpit had come from.

  As if remembering the other agent too, Rubio disregarded the now moveless form of Jacob Huffer and strode over to where McWilliams lay. Bullington looked on from the middle of the road, throwing occasional glances right and left to see if a car was coming.

  The lady jogger stared at Rubio in horror as he approached, the gore-streaked buck knife gripped in one hand. McWilliams lay gasping a mere six feet away from the jogger, and as Rubio loomed over the fallen agent, Griffin heard her quietly sobbing. A black puddle of blood surrounded the dying man.

  Rubio stood over McWilliams a moment.

  The he plunged the knife into McWilliams’s left eye and twisted. The sight of brackish-looking blood bubbling up around the revolving knife was grotesque, but it was the sound of the blade scraping bone that made Griffin retch. He puked all over the road, no longer able to bear the sight of Rubio’s butchery.

  When he finally finished puking, he stood up, lightheaded. He noted that Bullington was turned away, facing Marvin’s house. For a second Griffin thought Bullington had finally reached his limit for carnage, but then he saw Nicky, a silky black-and-red robe hanging loosely on his shoulders, emerging from the sidewalk. He didn’t appear at all surprised by the ghastly scene that greeted him. The jogger’s paralysis seemed finally to be shattering, her sculpted legs taking jerky backward steps away from Rubio.

  Rubio was still immersed in carving up McWilliams’s face. He’d connected the bloody craters where the agent’s eyes had been via a deep slash across the bridge of his nose, giving the man the appearance of having donned a messy pair of crimson spectacles.

  When the lady jogger bolted, she initially started off in the direction she had come, no doubt intending to get the hell home so she could call the police. But Jim Bullington was hulking in the middle of the road, and though he made no move toward her, the sight of him was enough to make her shriek and veer toward the shoulder.

  “Hey, lady!” Rubio called in a merry voice. “Come here and dance with me!”

  She shrieked again and scampered toward the path leading into the woods.

  “Hey, come back!” Rubio said, laughing and starting after her.

  His face as bereft of emotion as Rubio’s was full of sadistic mirth, Nicky ambled toward them, the robe coming open to reveal his naked body beneath.

  The jogger made her stumbling way up the incline, her terror making her clumsy. Moving fast for such a big man, Rubio clambered up the incline after her, and then both were gone into the thick forest. Nicky headed that way too, seemingly in no hurry.

  Moments later, the screams began.

  Griffin sank to the road, not caring that he was sitting in his own disgorged lunch.

  Rubio’s laughter merged with the lady jogger’s screams. Then Rubio began to grunt. Nicky disappeared into the woods. Smacking sounds could be heard from the sheltering forest, occasional pleas. Soon, the only things Griffin could hear were the noises Rubio and Nicky made.

&n
bsp; Griffin sank down with his head on his forearm. He realized he was weeping.

  Chapter Seven

  With Ben in the lead, they ventured into the lightless pit, which was about twenty feet wide and slightly longer than that. Ben kept his flashlight aimed at the ground ahead. He was scared, but the fear wasn’t as powerful as his desire to get Julia back.

  “You guys see anything?” Castillo asked, his voice reed-thin.

  “Not yet,” Jessie answered.

  “Man, what’s making that smell?”

  “Quiet, Agent Castillo.” That had been Morton, who seemed tense but very much in control of his fear. Jessie was doing fine as well. Brooks had grown uncharacteristically closemouthed.

  They neared the far end of the room. Ben scanned the walls for some sort of lever. He’d thought it over many times and was convinced there must be some sort of secret door here.

  He examined the walls, his breath growing thinner. It had been how long since Gabriel had disappeared with Julia last night? Twenty hours? Julia wouldn’t have had milk or anything else in that time, which meant she would be ravenous. Ben jerked his flashlight beam left and right, aimed it at the floor. Nothing. He inspected the ceiling. Nothing there either. What the hell?

  “It appears whatever you’re looking for is gone,” Morton said.

  “Can’t be,” Ben muttered. Turning, Ben pushed past Brooks and Morton. He would walk the perimeter, slowly inspecting the walls until he returned to this spot. If that didn’t work, he’d start moving about the room’s interior, probing for an opening of some kind. Ben touched the wall, began moving slowly along it, painting the ancient concrete with bright swaths of light.

  “Mr. Shadeland,” Morton said.

  The tips of Ben’s fingers scraped over the scabrous surface, the moisture down here making the concrete cool to the touch, almost frigid. His lips pressed together in concentration, Ben reached the corner and continued his inspection. Nothing yet. Nothing but wall, ceiling and floor. No secret passageways.